4 ms·

I have a similar claude story (much less money though), with the IRS R&D tax credit. The auditing firm initially said we qualify for $0. But then I had claude a

by atonse 5mo ago

I have a similar claude story (much less money though), with the IRS R&D tax credit. The auditing firm initially said we qualify for $0. But then I had claude analyze past R&D reports and our expenses and it found the problem. The auditor had miscategorized our company. So claude drafted an email even pointing to the right Internal Revenue Code (IRS Law), and specify why we fall under a specific category. The auditor got back to me two days later admitting their mistake and said our company now qualifies for $8k in tax credits. And a few months ago, it identified items in our AWS that saved us $250 a month (paying for itself). So now I joke that even if I have a claude max plan, I've still come out ahead financially.

nolok 5mo ago
To be fair regarding taxes it should be that you get all exemptions by default and the other side telling/justifying you why you don't qualify, instead of you not getting the things you should because you're not sure how to interpret the law or don't know this or that rule exists. Taxes shouldn't be that difficult, and the US version of it seems to be behind even the one I have here in europe (where my taxes are done "for me" for anything non business owner related). If the government is calculating your taxes anyway, they should just give the number to you instead of asking you a number and you better have the same as us or you're guilty of something. Feels like a system that is deliberatly made to be more punishing for those who can't afford the help or the education to figure things out.
- simonh 5mo ago
  Or punishing to those that don’t pay for software and services to the companies that lobby for it to be this way.
- atonse 5mo ago
  I would agree with you on most situations (like 1040 personal income taxes especially). But in this particular tax credit, there's no way for the gov to know automatically what percentage of payroll was spent in qualified R&D expenses, since it's day to day business operations. Which is why we are _forced_ to hire an outside firm and pay them thousands of dollars (when Claude did an even better job), just to analyze how much of our time qualified as R&D expenses. The problem I have is that I am forced to have to find a firm to do this, and most firms won't even work with companies as small as ours. So then we're stuck and losing out on years of R&D tax credits at the moment, when I really don't need them anymore, to be honest.
- gobdovan 5mo ago
  [dead]
- chasd00 5mo ago
  i saw a meme once like: IRS> Pay your taxes! me> ok how much? IRS> idk you have to figure it out me> ...ok IRS> if you get it wrong you goto jail
  - twobitshifter 5mo ago
    I remember a different ending me> so you don’t know how much I owe? IRS> no, we do… me> ...ok IRS> if you get it wrong you goto jail
binkHN 5mo ago
> So now I joke that even if I have a claude max plan, I've still come out ahead financially. This is no joke; for better or worse, I see a day when I'm paying a lot more for this and it will be a bargain.
- wolttam 5mo ago
  By my estimation (guess) you won't actually need to spend that much because the models are already getting a point where they don't need to get a whole lot better to be extremely helpful across many domains. And it looks like those very helpful capabilities will continue to transfer to smaller models as well, as architectures and training regimes continue to refine. I can fairly easily imagine a world where the only people needing to spend a lot of money on models are those that are using them to solve truly novel problems. The rest of us will get plenty of use at reasonable costs for the typical day-to-day helpful stuff.
  - hypercube33 5mo ago
    All we need is something like Qwen3-coder-next but at Kimi K2.6 ability so it runs on laptop workstation hardware and we are set...soon?
    - wolttam 5mo ago
      In 2023 GPT-4 was allegedly 1.8T parameters. In 2026 we have ~100x smaller models (10-20B) that handily outperform it, and can indeed run on a laptop.
      - rectang 5mo ago
        How does "outperform" translate to the propensity of an LLM to hallucinate?
        operatingthetan 5mo ago
        There seems to be a mass delusion about how capable SOTA models actually are. That's my only explanation for how poorly I find them performing in basic knowledge tasks compared to how others describe their prowess.
anon291 5mo ago
Same... I had chatgpt go over my taxes (I do it myself) and it found a number of savings I qualified for
- gonzalohm 5mo ago
  Can you explain the steps you followed? Did you just feed it the whole return?
  - anon291 5mo ago
    Kind of. I first of all did the entire return with it. So we went step by step and yes I fed the forms one at a time. So I filled in 1040 as best I could. Then just asked it what to do next at each step. It helps I've done it before so most of the steps it returned were ones I've done before. However, it did mention several things that I had not heard of, and also some new taxes that I had to file due to some exceptional events last year. So all in all, a solid use case. This year I have an accountant, but it saved my butt this last year, and I will absolutely run through my accountants decisions with it. It has an encyclopedic knowledge and an immense capability to understand without getting tired.
- sitzkrieg 5mo ago
  very trustworthy of the system sharing your taxes with a third party
  - anon291 5mo ago
    People's tax returns are essentially public (yes I know they're not allowed to disclose them). Didn't send the forms in with social security numbers. This absurd concern for privacy is silly in my opinion. The moment something is submitted to the government it ought to be considered public. Even your social security number is essentially public for anyone who cares to find it. I would not submit my bank account information to these services, or my passwords, obviously. Honestly, tax returns should be public again. Would make everyone better behaved IMO. It was this way for most of American income tax history believe it or not. To be clear, my information has already been part of several breaches anyway. What protects you ultimately is the law not information security. Of course this point is often lost on engineering / computer scientist types who don't understand how law works.
fortran77 5mo ago
I use AI to help me do my accounting (how to categorize and account for things). It pays for itself because I need to spend money for far fewer hours from an accounting firm each month to make sure that captialized expenses, depreciation, tax credits (we have Historical Tax Credits from restoring an 1880s building) etc, is put in the books properly. The AI gets it right a high enough percentage of the time that I only the to have a real accountant look at things once a quarter to make sure it's all OK. I used to have a dozen questions every month.
surcap526 5mo ago
[dead]
TrueGeek 5mo ago
> it identified items in our AWS that saved us $250 a month I gave Claude Code access to the Azure CLI and had it review usage. It found a couple servers that were underpowered, but it also found a lot of things that weren't being used at all. The total reduction was $40k a year.

by atonse 5mo ago

nolok 5mo ago

To be fair regarding taxes it should be that you get all exemptions by default and the other side telling/justifying you why you don't qualify, instead of you not getting the things you should because you're not sure how to interpret the law or don't know this or that rule exists. Taxes shouldn't be that difficult, and the US version of it seems to be behind even the one I have here in europe (where my taxes are done "for me" for anything non business owner related). If the government is calculating your taxes anyway, they should just give the number to you instead of asking you a number and you better have the same as us or you're guilty of something. Feels like a system that is deliberatly made to be more punishing for those who can't afford the help or the education to figure things out.

simonh 5mo ago
Or punishing to those that don’t pay for software and services to the companies that lobby for it to be this way.
atonse 5mo ago
I would agree with you on most situations (like 1040 personal income taxes especially). But in this particular tax credit, there's no way for the gov to know automatically what percentage of payroll was spent in qualified R&D expenses, since it's day to day business operations. Which is why we are _forced_ to hire an outside firm and pay them thousands of dollars (when Claude did an even better job), just to analyze how much of our time qualified as R&D expenses. The problem I have is that I am forced to have to find a firm to do this, and most firms won't even work with companies as small as ours. So then we're stuck and losing out on years of R&D tax credits at the moment, when I really don't need them anymore, to be honest.
gobdovan 5mo ago
[dead]
chasd00 5mo ago
i saw a meme once like: IRS> Pay your taxes! me> ok how much? IRS> idk you have to figure it out me> ...ok IRS> if you get it wrong you goto jail
- twobitshifter 5mo ago
  I remember a different ending me> so you don’t know how much I owe? IRS> no, we do… me> ...ok IRS> if you get it wrong you goto jail

binkHN 5mo ago

> So now I joke that even if I have a claude max plan, I've still come out ahead financially. This is no joke; for better or worse, I see a day when I'm paying a lot more for this and it will be a bargain.

wolttam 5mo ago
By my estimation (guess) you won't actually need to spend that much because the models are already getting a point where they don't need to get a whole lot better to be extremely helpful across many domains. And it looks like those very helpful capabilities will continue to transfer to smaller models as well, as architectures and training regimes continue to refine. I can fairly easily imagine a world where the only people needing to spend a lot of money on models are those that are using them to solve truly novel problems. The rest of us will get plenty of use at reasonable costs for the typical day-to-day helpful stuff.
- hypercube33 5mo ago
  All we need is something like Qwen3-coder-next but at Kimi K2.6 ability so it runs on laptop workstation hardware and we are set...soon?
  - wolttam 5mo ago
    In 2023 GPT-4 was allegedly 1.8T parameters. In 2026 we have ~100x smaller models (10-20B) that handily outperform it, and can indeed run on a laptop.
    - rectang 5mo ago
      How does "outperform" translate to the propensity of an LLM to hallucinate?
      - operatingthetan 5mo ago
        There seems to be a mass delusion about how capable SOTA models actually are. That's my only explanation for how poorly I find them performing in basic knowledge tasks compared to how others describe their prowess.

anon291 5mo ago

Same... I had chatgpt go over my taxes (I do it myself) and it found a number of savings I qualified for

gonzalohm 5mo ago
Can you explain the steps you followed? Did you just feed it the whole return?
- anon291 5mo ago
  Kind of. I first of all did the entire return with it. So we went step by step and yes I fed the forms one at a time. So I filled in 1040 as best I could. Then just asked it what to do next at each step. It helps I've done it before so most of the steps it returned were ones I've done before. However, it did mention several things that I had not heard of, and also some new taxes that I had to file due to some exceptional events last year. So all in all, a solid use case. This year I have an accountant, but it saved my butt this last year, and I will absolutely run through my accountants decisions with it. It has an encyclopedic knowledge and an immense capability to understand without getting tired.
sitzkrieg 5mo ago
very trustworthy of the system sharing your taxes with a third party
- anon291 5mo ago
  People's tax returns are essentially public (yes I know they're not allowed to disclose them). Didn't send the forms in with social security numbers. This absurd concern for privacy is silly in my opinion. The moment something is submitted to the government it ought to be considered public. Even your social security number is essentially public for anyone who cares to find it. I would not submit my bank account information to these services, or my passwords, obviously. Honestly, tax returns should be public again. Would make everyone better behaved IMO. It was this way for most of American income tax history believe it or not. To be clear, my information has already been part of several breaches anyway. What protects you ultimately is the law not information security. Of course this point is often lost on engineering / computer scientist types who don't understand how law works.

fortran77 5mo ago

I use AI to help me do my accounting (how to categorize and account for things). It pays for itself because I need to spend money for far fewer hours from an accounting firm each month to make sure that captialized expenses, depreciation, tax credits (we have Historical Tax Credits from restoring an 1880s building) etc, is put in the books properly. The AI gets it right a high enough percentage of the time that I only the to have a real accountant look at things once a quarter to make sure it's all OK. I used to have a dozen questions every month.

surcap526 5mo ago

[dead]

TrueGeek 5mo ago

> it identified items in our AWS that saved us $250 a month I gave Claude Code access to the Azure CLI and had it review usage. It found a couple servers that were underpowered, but it also found a lot of things that weren't being used at all. The total reduction was $40k a year.