10 ms·
25 Years of Eggs
- BoredPositron 6mo agoThere is a reason why reciept transcription is still the task with the highest demand on mechanical turk.
- egeozcan 6mo agoI usually avoid shallow comments but I feel like this time it has to be said as a conversation starter: That's a lot of eggs! Also ignoring the benefits of subscriptions, an estimate in the magnitude of thousands of dollars for extracting egg prices still makes me feel like we aren't "there" yet. This should have been a problem with a much more efficient solution given the advancements in the AI, data analysis and OCR space. I am sort of disillusioned.
- sgbeal 6mo ago> This should have been a problem with a much more efficient solution given the advancements in the AI, data analysis and OCR space. There's got to be a "it's a chicken/egg problem" joke in there somewhere, but i'm not seeing it.
- egeozcan 6mo agoI actually was going to go for the "why did the chicken not cross the road?". Then I wanted to say "because it was in a price negotiation with the author to sell its eggs", but it was too wordy. Then I thought, "because the author had it as an egg before it could hatch", but it was too dark... Then I gave up. Well, I guess you cannot make a chicken joke without breaking some eggs (I'll stop now. I'm really sorry, but come on, it's Sunday).
- tclancy 6mo agoTry a different vision model.
- f0cus10 6mo ago[dead]
- wiether 6mo ago> That's a lot of eggs! Less than one per day, assuming they're doing groceries only for themselves
- MarceliusK 6mo agoI wouldn't read this as "AI can't do this efficiently yet" but more like "we're still figuring out the playbook"
- sgbeal 6mo ago> Estimated token cost $1,591 > Confirmed egg receipts 589 > Total egg spend captured $1,972 > Total eggs 8,604 ... > I can’t wait to see what 30 years of eggs looks like. At $2.70 per receipt, i'd be in no hurry to find out!
- PowerElectronix 6mo agoInflation adjusted dsta just comes to tell us that either eggs have been outdoing the CPI for 25 years or that actual CPI is way higher than what the BLS calculates.
- yorwba 6mo agoCPI tracks a weighted average of a large basket of different goods, of which eggs are only a small part. It would be extremely surprising if the change in egg prices over time closely matched CPI.
- vitus 6mo agoIt depends what dates you're looking at, but energy (gas prices and more) and food (including eggs) are generally recognized as way more volatile than the rest of the CPI. Eggs were actually quite stable for the 20 years prior to 2001, so maybe don't put your life savings into egg futures... Egg prices: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/APU0000708111 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/APU0000708111 CPI: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CPIAUCSL https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CPIAUCSL Core CPI (without food + energy prices): https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CPILFESL https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CPILFESL
- PowerElectronix 6mo agoThat is very curious, yes. Eggs seem to just start to increase dramatically after 2000 and indeed outdo the CPI, disregarding the peaks and valleys of the different shocks to egg production like covid and the avian flu. I read that the price includes free range, eco, etc varieties which are more expensive and in more demand nowadays, probably just that explains a good chunk of the price increase.
- bix6 6mo agoThis is a good read if you haven’t seen it. Spoiler alert it’s private equity. Shocker I know. https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/hatching-a-conspiracy-a-big-investigation https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/hatching-a-conspiracy-a-b...
- cheschire 6mo agoAbsolutely loved the article, the process, and the results. Hated the price. You could pay a human to read receipts, 1 every 30 seconds (that’s slow!), $15/hr (twice the US federal minimum wage!), plus tax and overhead ($15x1.35) comes out to $20.25/hr over 5 hours. $101 all in. Sure, sure, a human solution doesn’t scale. But this sort of project makes me feel like we haven’t hit the industrialization moment that i thought we had quite yet.
- wolfram74 6mo agoI mean, at over 1000% the cost, the machine solution doesn't scale either?
- cheschire 6mo agoI think at a certain scale we're talking about switching to local trained models which don't have the same operating costs as running a frontier model for OCR. That would reduce the ongoing costs significantly. Might take longer than 30 seconds to read each receipt if you run multiple passes to ensure accuracy, but could run 24/7/365 without the same tax and administration overhead of humans. Spherical cows aside though, I do agree with you that I should not consider scalability as a given.
- wolfram74 6mo agoI suppose if we had access to a public data set like this receipt bank, programmers could time themselves setting up a solution with off the shelf OCR algos. If they could clock in at under 10 hours they could advertise themselves as being "just as good as an LLM, but significantly cheaper." Downside for the managerial class that wants generative algos for the complete lack of legal protections.
- ProllyInfamous 6mo agoNot yet. >>So I told Codex “we have unlimited tokens, let’s use them all,” and we pivoted to sending every receipt through Codex for structured extraction. From that one sentence, Codex came back with a parallel worker architecture - sharding, health management, checkpointing, retry logic. The whole thing. When I ran out of tokens on Codex mid-run, it auto-switched to Claude and kept going. I didn’t ask it to do that. I didn’t know it had happened until I read the logs. ---- For anybody still thinking my goodness, how wasteful is this SINGLE EXAMPLE: remember that all of the receipts from the article have helped better-train whichever GPT is deciphering all this thermalprinting. For a small business owner (like my former self), paying $1500 to have an AI decipher all my receipts is still a heck of a lot cheaper than my accountant's rate. It would also motivate me to actually keep receipts (instead of throw-away/guessing), simply to undaunt the monumental task of recordskeeping. ---- >>But the runs kept crashing. Long CLI jobs died when sessions timed out. The script committed results at end-of-run, so early deaths lost everything. I watched it happen three times. On the fourth attempt I said “I would have expected we start a new process per batch.” That was the fix ... Codex patched it, launched it in a tmux session, and the ETA dropped from 12 hours to 3. Not a hard fix. Just the kind of thing you know after you’ve watched enough overnight jobs die at 3 AM. >>11,345 receipts processed. The thing that was supposed to take all night finished before I went to bed.
- tkgally 6mo agoI haven't tried it with receipts, but I've gotten excellent OCR results with Gemini 3.0 and now 3.1 on some challenging texts: handwritten letters I couldn't fully decipher myself, vertically printed Japanese texts with tiny furigana readings next to the kanji, a 19th century book in English with extensive use of italics and small caps. Gemini is good at extracting text and formatting from complex layouts, and it might work with egg receipts, too.
- gib444 6mo ago> Estimated token cost $1,591 I can assume this person does in fact NOT need to worry about the price of eggs ?
- OJFord 6mo agoI think they worked that back from tokens used, hence the estimation, but their actual billing was Claude Code & Codex subscriptions. (Which probably was also the main contributor to it taking 14 days.)
- flurb 6mo agoGreat article through and through. The total number of places you've bought eggs at made me feel a tad depressed though: 4 places where you lived at or spent a longer time, 5 you traveled to *. I tend to grow bored of a location after a year or two, though I'm certainly in the minority. * Of course you didn't buy eggs every time you traveled somewhere, so probably not the entire truth.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- eeixlk 6mo agoApart from the comical cost of extracting this data from paper receipts, is it more likely that stores will publish their product costs over time so trends can be observed or be more like gas stations where no prices are listed. I have no idea why a box of Cheerios costs $7 for processed oats but i see millions of reasons to obscure that data.
- sylos 6mo agoStores will never publish anything like that. Why would they give consumers more informatian.
- ProllyInfamous 6mo ago>Everyone needs a rewarding hobby. I’ve been scanning all of my receipts since 2001. I never typed in a single price - just kept the images. I figured someday the technology to read them would catch up, and the data would be interesting. This is perhaps among the best openers I've ever read. [spoiler: the tech caught up, the data is interesting] I read a lot. This article, entirely.
- MarceliusK 6mo agoTechnically interesting and genuinely well-written end to end
- andai 6mo agoI have the same thing except instead of receipts, I've been saving everything. "Some day, AI will be able to sort this out." Now I'm just waiting for the token costs to come down ;)
- ProllyInfamous 6mo agoIt'll be less than a year and an .app will exist solely for this (to then be bought out by Accountoglomerate Co, INC, mostly for all the consumerdata). I can imagine (as a former) business owner support for this is worth $100/month, a personalplan much less but still interested [introfree tier?!]. IMHO the worst part of running any business/project is the paperwork... My taxesforms still get struck typewritten. For 2022, I thanked ChatGPT (lol). Audit me, I don't care (you will).
- DeathArrow 6mo agoWithout 25 years of photographing receipts, weeks of agents coding and billions of token spent, I can predict that egg prices increased, and the graph of my egg consumption over time is concave, part because my income has risen, part because while all prices get inflated, eggs are still cheaper than other sources of protein, and I did in less than 1 microsecond. I will use them tokens to be able to afford more eggs.
- ismailmaj 6mo agoI don't know why people mess with tesseract in 2026, attention-based OCRs (and more recently VLMs) outperformed any LSTM-based approach since at least 2020. My guess is that it's the entry-point to OCR and the internet is flooded by that, just like pandas for data processing.
- mettamage 6mo agoPainful comparison haha Leaving a comment so I can more easily find this And for the people wondering about Pandas, use Polars instead
- petercooper 6mo agoQuite, I threw a so-so photo of an old, long receipt at Qwen 3.5 0.8MB (runs in <2GB) and it nailed spitting 20+ items out in under a second. AI is good at many things, but picking modern dependencies not so much.
- andai 6mo agoAre you running it with Ollama?
- petercooper 6mo agoLM Studio in this case
- eichin 6mo agoI was surprised to learn (from this article) that there are local models that can do this (not sure if there are any that run on hardware I actually have though, unlike Tesseract which works fine on the scanning hardware I set up for it ~5 years ago.) For privacy reasons, cloud-based OCR is a non-starter...
- segmondy 6mo agosurprisingly, the ocr models don't need much vram, they are often about 2b, so most 6gb GPU will handle it fine.
- BitsAndObjects 6mo agoThe AI writing of the article made me give up halfway through. It’s a neat idea but the writing style of these AI models is brain-grating, especially when it’s the wrong style choice for this kind of technical report.
- MarceliusK 6mo agoOverall this feels less like a quirky egg project and more like a blueprint for how messy real-world data pipelines are going to look going forward
- ProllyInfamous 6mo ago>>Here’s what made the quality good: every time I caught something, I could show the agents what to look for and they’d go fix it everywhere. ... >>These are the days of miracle and wonder. I can’t wait to see what [the next] 30 years of eggs looks like.
- eichin 6mo agoNot convinced of that edit - or at least, my read was "revisit this 5 years from now", not 30...
- ProllyInfamous 6mo agoThe edit was perhaps personal... actuarily, three decades is what I'd be given =D Now that I'm revisiting these comments, thanks for pointing out that 30 - 25 == five years into the future [honestly, I hadn't even given this any thought...] 1999 was ten years ago, right.!?
- PaulHoule 6mo agoI am amused that this in the classic 1955 Asimov story https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franchise_(short_story) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franchise_(short_story) the protagonist is interviewed as a one-man "focus group" in lieu of a national election and one of the questions he is asked is "What do you think about the price of eggs?" and he said roughly "I have no idea, my wife does the shopping."
- Metacelsus 6mo agoAnd if the price reflected the externalities of factory farming, eggs would be even more expensive!
- rdiddly 6mo agoThis is the perfect job for AI, in that it's handling work the human didn't care enough to do manually. Although of course I don't care either. No value judgment there, just an observation. Imagine a place - a field let's say, part of a farm, long ago, but it had a road built through it, and thereby became a non-place, a patch of ground nobody dwells in or pays attention to or cares about, because when they're on it they're always heading somewhere else. The AI phenomenon is like that.
- smcg 6mo agoMany states passed requirements for cage free eggs that went into effect by end of 2024 so that has had some effect on prices.
- TurdF3rguson 6mo agoI think it's mostly been caused by avian-flu related shortages and rising feed costs. I've personally had an avian-flu disaster, it's a nightmare to recover from.
- brcmthrowaway 6mo agoQuestion: Do big chat providers tool call an dedicated OCR, or is it part of the LLM?
- hbarka 6mo agoIt’s so exciting to read more and more articles like this, using LLMs to discover clever solutions. I mean how many of us have dreamed of scanning years of receipts, waiting for that moment when you know a DIY solo application is at hand. I’m not being sarcastic, I too have a drawer full of Costco receipts which to me are data waiting for insight, not just crinkly paper. It’s more than being clever, it’s the realization of using a device not as a tool, but an equal partner who can suggest what tools and approaches to do. The end product of the LLM is not the point (although it can produce it better than ever), it’s the way an LLM can elevate messy knowledge work. A single person can now say that analysis knows no bounds.
- dinohlm 6mo agoThe most surprising thing about this whole story is that he's been scanning all his receipts for the past 25 years. I've never heard of anyone doing this before and don't really know why you would want to. Still, it made for a somewhat interesting exploration of AI techniques.
- ProllyInfamous 6mo agoI did this, perhaps thirty years ago (rocking a flatbed in the 90s #ROFL)... for about two years. Then decided that OCR was terrible. I revisited on a multifunction copier, mid-00s — to the same conclusion. Once this can be run entirely offline, with simple github installer [0]... I'll be scanning again. This definitely "reminesced a nerve" that "took me back..." Unfortunately not looking good for accountants, among others... [0] I'd recon the majority would use a cloud-based, off-device processing — they just selfie each receipt ---- Ten years ago I still used a smartphone; when the banks started allowing mobile deposit, was a very Trekkie day for me...
- s1mn 6mo agoI'm such a sucker for a good, data-driven article. Love this.
- ttul 6mo agoTokens consumed: 1.6 billion Estimated token cost: $1,591 Wow.
- jtwaleson 6mo agoHmm, I've been sending receipts straight into Gemini 3 Flash and it handles them just fine. No need for this whole pipeline and definitely MUCH cheaper. Am I missing something?
- JumpCrisscross 6mo agoExpensive eggs are a political choice. Canada has eggs [1]. Mexico, too [2]. Meanwhile we have Tyson notching record profits [3] while facing zero antitrust scrutiny. [1] https://www.npr.org/2025/03/18/nx-s1-5330454/egg-shortages-record-prices-usda-canada https://www.npr.org/2025/03/18/nx-s1-5330454/egg-shortages-r... [2] https://www.globalproductprices.com/rankings/egg_prices/ https://www.globalproductprices.com/rankings/egg_prices/ [3] https://farmaction.us/farm-action-calls-for-an-investigation-into-skyrocketing-egg-prices-and-restricted-supply/ https://farmaction.us/farm-action-calls-for-an-investigation...
- krogenx 6mo agoA bit of a shill comment but… I have chickens and have been tracking egg production in an app that I’ve built, a livestock manager of sorts called Manger. Looking at my data, since we’ve had our first egg 743 days ago, our hens have produced 9,393 eggs, or an average of just above a dozen a day. The app can also count chickens, since each chicken has a UHF RFID. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_iGn_pZ3IkY https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_iGn_pZ3IkY
- faxmeyourcode 6mo agoWow, I didn't realize some RFID could reach 15 feet out - that's good to know. I naively thought you essentially had to be touching the surface of the tag.
- rkagerer 6mo ago10 years ago I wrote a reconciliation tool in VBA in Excel. I scan I all the (mostly thermal-printed) receipts and it matches them to credit card charges. I always envisioned incorporating OCR to automatically extract the totals, but the libraries were never good enough for my taste (and I've used industry-leading ones in work settings that process millions of reads a day). So instead, I made a very simple UI where you just key in the amount (literally 5 keystrokes on average per image) and it finds the matching charge (or hit enter to instantly cycle through all matches). I've done bookeeping/taxes that way for a decade and keying has never been the bottleneck. Recently I realized Amazon accounts for around a third of my credit card charges, by volume (yikes!). Unfortunately their transactions are more difficult to reconcile as portions of orders are charged piecemeal as they ship. Further, their webpage that is supposed to list your credit card charges with the matching order numbers is broken (lots of data missing - have reproduced and filed a bug report with their exec team which is still being worked on a month later). So I wrote another tool. You download your order data and invoices via a personal data request, and it goes out and reconciles all of them. I wind up with a nice spreadsheet i can scroll around in, and whenever the cursor hits a row with an Amazon charge all the paperwork along with a generated order summary (granular down to the shipments and items) comes up on the screen to the right. Pretty slick. And took less time to code up than his vibecoded project (but hats off to him anyway, sounds like a nice little project to hone your AI skills on). Sometimes these simple little bespoke tools are a far superior "productivity force multiplier" than fancy, generic commercial equivalents.
- twinpost_rules 6mo ago[dead]
- rendaw 6mo agoOkay, so this is good for tracking egg price changes (I guess? It was $1,591). But if you put this into your accounting spreadsheet or whatever, you'd be off by a few cents all over the place, your account balances wouldn't match up. Then what do you do? I've been looking into this and 96% isn't great. The solution is digital receipts... which are still being blocked by industry interests etc etc.