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Not enough time, too many projects. Useful projects I did over the weekend with Opus 4.6 and GPT 5.4 (just casually chatting with it). 2025 Taxes Dumped all p

Not enough time, too many projects. Useful projects I did over the weekend with Opus 4.6 and GPT 5.4 (just casually chatting with it). 2025 Taxes Dumped all pdfs of all my tax forms into a single folder, asked Claude the rename them nicely. Ask it to use Gemini 2.5 Flash to extract out all tax-relevant details from all statements / tax forms. Had it put together a webui showing all income, deductions, etc, for the year. Had it estimate my 2025 tax refund / underpay. Result was amazing. I now actually fully understand the tax position. It broke down all the progressive tax brackets, added notes for all the extra federal and state taxes (i.e. Medicare, CA Mental Health tax, etc). Finally had Claude prepare all of my docs for upload to my accountant: FinCEN reporting, summary of all docs, etc. Desk Fabrication Planning on having a furniture maker fabricate a custom walnut solid desk for a custom office standing desk. Want to create a STEP of the exact cuts / bevels / countersinks / etc to help with fabrication. Worked with Codex to plan out and then build an interactive in-browser 3D CAD experience. I can ask Codex to add some component (i.e. a grommet) and it will generate a parameterized B-rep geometry for that feature and then allow me to control the parameters live in the web UI. Codex found Open CASCADE Technology (OCCT) B-rep modeling library, which has a web assembly compiled version, and integrated it. Now have a WebGL view of the desk, can add various components, change their parameters, and see the impact live in 3D.

thijsvandien 7mo ago
I don't know, but I would never upload such sensitive information to a service like that (local models FTW!) or trust the numbers.
- basch 7mo ago
  Which part is sensitive? Social is public, income is private but what is someone going to do with it?
  - thijsvandien 7mo ago
    Now that's a question I'd feel more confident having answered by an LLM. Personally, I'm tired of arguing with "nothing to hide", which (no offense) is just terribly naive these days.
    - whackernews 7mo ago
      I find it really weird too, like, haven’t we done this? Also struggle to understand the motivation for arguing from this direction. Do people forget it’s the normal, default position NOT to be spied on?
  - jumpman500 7mo ago
    It's not good in some job negotiations if someone has a very clear picture of what your current net worth and income is. Also in some purchases companies could price discriminate more effectively against you.
  - whackernews 7mo ago
    Where’s the line for you? Would you upload a picture of you sat on the toilet for example?
  - AlecSchueler 7mo ago
    That's dream info for targeted advertising and political manipulation.
cj 7mo ago
I love the tax use case. What scares me though is how I've (still) seen ChatGPT make up numbers in some specific scenarios. I have a ChatGPT project with all of my bloodwork and a bunch of medical info from the past 10 years uploaded. I think it's more context than ChatGPT can handle at once. When I ask it basic things like "Compare how my lipids have trended over the past 2 years" it will sometimes make up numbers for tests, or it will mix up the dates on a certain data points. It's usually very small errors that I don't notice until I really study what it's telling me. And also the opposite problem: A couple days ago I thought I saw an error (when really ChatGPT was right). So I said "No, that number is wrong, find the error" and instead of pushing back and telling me the number was right, it admitted to the error (there was no error) and made up a reason why it was wrong. Hallucinations have gotten way better compared to a couple years ago, but at least ChatGPT seems to still break down especially when it's overloaded with a ton of context, in my experience.
- shepherdjerred 7mo ago
  I've gotten better results by telling it "write a Python program to calculate X"
  - cj 7mo ago
    Good call. I’ve also had better results pre-processing PDFs, extracting data into structured format, and then running prompts against that. Which should pair well with the “write a script” tactic.
    - tavavex 7mo ago
      Yeah, asking for a tool to do a thing is almost always better than asking for the thing directly, I find. LLMs are kind of not there in terms of always being correct with large batches of data. And when you ask for a script, you can actually verify what's going on in there, without taking leaps of faith.
  - dmd 7mo ago
    Yeah, in my user prompt I have "Whenever you are asked to perform any operation which could be done deterministically by a program, you should write a program to do it that way and feed it the data, rather than thinking through the problem on your own." It's worked wonders.
whattheheckheck 7mo ago
I had ai hallucinate that you can use different container images at runtime for emr serverless. That was incorrect its only at application creation time. Hope you dont get audited
MikeNotThePope 7mo ago
Be careful with taxes. Hallucinations will cost you.
slopinthebag 7mo ago
> had Claude prepare all of my docs for upload to my accountant: FinCEN reporting, summary of all docs, etc. I imagine your accountant had the same reaction I do when an amateur shows me their vibe codebase.
mandeepj 7mo ago
> Result was amazing. I now actually fully understand the tax position. You couldn’t do that with TurboTax or block’s tax file? You don’t have to submit or pay.
g947o 7mo ago
We usually call that FAAFO
generallyjosh 7mo ago
Did it make any mistakes on your taxes? Personally, I know coding pretty well. So when I'm using it for coding, I can spot most of its mistakes / misunderstandings I would not trust using it on a complex domain I'm not super familiar with, like doing taxes A mistake here is pretty high cost (getting audited, and/or having to pay a bunch in penalties)

thijsvandien 7mo ago

I don't know, but I would never upload such sensitive information to a service like that (local models FTW!) or trust the numbers.

basch 7mo ago
Which part is sensitive? Social is public, income is private but what is someone going to do with it?
- thijsvandien 7mo ago
  Now that's a question I'd feel more confident having answered by an LLM. Personally, I'm tired of arguing with "nothing to hide", which (no offense) is just terribly naive these days.
  - whackernews 7mo ago
    I find it really weird too, like, haven’t we done this? Also struggle to understand the motivation for arguing from this direction. Do people forget it’s the normal, default position NOT to be spied on?
- jumpman500 7mo ago
  It's not good in some job negotiations if someone has a very clear picture of what your current net worth and income is. Also in some purchases companies could price discriminate more effectively against you.
- whackernews 7mo ago
  Where’s the line for you? Would you upload a picture of you sat on the toilet for example?
- AlecSchueler 7mo ago
  That's dream info for targeted advertising and political manipulation.

cj 7mo ago

I love the tax use case. What scares me though is how I've (still) seen ChatGPT make up numbers in some specific scenarios. I have a ChatGPT project with all of my bloodwork and a bunch of medical info from the past 10 years uploaded. I think it's more context than ChatGPT can handle at once. When I ask it basic things like "Compare how my lipids have trended over the past 2 years" it will sometimes make up numbers for tests, or it will mix up the dates on a certain data points. It's usually very small errors that I don't notice until I really study what it's telling me. And also the opposite problem: A couple days ago I thought I saw an error (when really ChatGPT was right). So I said "No, that number is wrong, find the error" and instead of pushing back and telling me the number was right, it admitted to the error (there was no error) and made up a reason why it was wrong. Hallucinations have gotten way better compared to a couple years ago, but at least ChatGPT seems to still break down especially when it's overloaded with a ton of context, in my experience.

shepherdjerred 7mo ago
I've gotten better results by telling it "write a Python program to calculate X"
- cj 7mo ago
  Good call. I’ve also had better results pre-processing PDFs, extracting data into structured format, and then running prompts against that. Which should pair well with the “write a script” tactic.
  - tavavex 7mo ago
    Yeah, asking for a tool to do a thing is almost always better than asking for the thing directly, I find. LLMs are kind of not there in terms of always being correct with large batches of data. And when you ask for a script, you can actually verify what's going on in there, without taking leaps of faith.
- dmd 7mo ago
  Yeah, in my user prompt I have "Whenever you are asked to perform any operation which could be done deterministically by a program, you should write a program to do it that way and feed it the data, rather than thinking through the problem on your own." It's worked wonders.

whattheheckheck 7mo ago

I had ai hallucinate that you can use different container images at runtime for emr serverless. That was incorrect its only at application creation time. Hope you dont get audited

MikeNotThePope 7mo ago

Be careful with taxes. Hallucinations will cost you.

slopinthebag 7mo ago

> had Claude prepare all of my docs for upload to my accountant: FinCEN reporting, summary of all docs, etc. I imagine your accountant had the same reaction I do when an amateur shows me their vibe codebase.

mandeepj 7mo ago

> Result was amazing. I now actually fully understand the tax position. You couldn’t do that with TurboTax or block’s tax file? You don’t have to submit or pay.

g947o 7mo ago

We usually call that FAAFO

generallyjosh 7mo ago

Did it make any mistakes on your taxes? Personally, I know coding pretty well. So when I'm using it for coding, I can spot most of its mistakes / misunderstandings I would not trust using it on a complex domain I'm not super familiar with, like doing taxes A mistake here is pretty high cost (getting audited, and/or having to pay a bunch in penalties)