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.

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binkHN 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> 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.

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wolttam 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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rectang 18 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

In my anecdotal experience there is a huge gap between GPT-5-mini which hallucinates relentlessly and Claude Opus or the latest GPTs which are fairly reliable. I'm hoping that gap can be closed with improved approaches for small models and that good reliability is achievable for LLMs without requiring absolutely mammoth computing resources.

For what it's worth, I also used GPT-5.2 (via duck.ai) this year for questions about taxes and it was helpful — which makes sense because there's so much material about taxes out there to be synthesized, so a text predictor trained in that domain should do well.

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hypercube33 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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?

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wolttam an hour ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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rectang 8 minutes ago | parent [-]

How does "outperform" translate to the propensity of an LLM to hallucinate?

	▲	operatingthetan 5 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		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.

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unshavedyak 36 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

I am eagerly awaiting being able to run a strong local model. I'd hand Apple $5k right now for a Claude in a box. I know the cost might not be there now, just saying that is around my ideal price point.

$10k might even be worth it - but i'm assuming that the more expensive it is the beefier it is too, which also means more electricity.. and i already run ~6 computers/servers in my house. If a power surge happens i'm going to go live in the woods lol.

	▲	atonse 13 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I would do the same but my issue is that the models are changing so fast, so I don't want to be left out of the next model cuz it only runs on an even newer GPU or something like that. But maybe my limited understanding is thinking of this wrong.
	▲	DANmode 24 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		You can run 6-12 month old state of the art models for that type of money, like, yesterday.

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Barbing an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

[sci-fi “AGI” scenario] What if those with elite model access philosophize in a way us mere mortals can’t understand, so the elites have to prechew the ideas for us to bring them to our level, and they control the narrative?

In reality now, curious about social implications generally. Does this go beyond problem solving? Maybe the intelligence per token you get via your free library card/membership is insufficient to compete with peers in dating/employment/etc. markets, thus puts you at disadvantage.

	▲	unixhero 19 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		That isn't really philosophy, but rather doom and gloom theories. Control the narrative on what exactly, how I write a bootstrap script for my servers? Or what type of flower is in this photo. Not everything is politics luckily.

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baq 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I've seen this day sometime in December and not only with Claude. Wish I was joking on some days, feeling exhilarated on others.

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nolok 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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atonse 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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simonh 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Or punishing to those that don’t pay for software and services to the companies that lobby for it to be this way.

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chasd00 29 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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 22 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		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

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gobdovan 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[dead]

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anon291 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

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

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sitzkrieg 7 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

very trustworthy of the system sharing your taxes with a third party

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gonzalohm an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Can you explain the steps you followed? Did you just feed it the whole return?

	▲	anon291 42 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		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.