My wife was a diehard YNAB user before we met but it went by the wayside once we merged finances. She wanted to get back to better managing our money and started using Google Sheets and then got stuck. She asked me for help trying to create a pivot table and like any good engineer, I built her an entirely new application instead.

In my defense though, it does way more than a spreadsheet. Stuff like OCRing screenshots of bank transactions with a specialized, locally-hosted LLM to avoid data harvesters like Plaid. This became an entirely separate subsystem with verification, automated model benchmarking, prompt provenance, etc.

You'd be surprised at how quickly edge cases start to pile up when an accounting system makes contact with the real world. (If you buy something on a credit card and then return it after your statement closes but before your payment is due, do you still owe a minimum payment based on that purchase? Well... depends on your bank. Capital One and Chase: yes, US Bank: no.)

> Just how much functionality are you getting out of that?

I'm still dogfooding it. It's a pretty opinionated app that has things a month-end closing ceremony, reconciliation processes, envelope-based budgeting cycles. So unfortunately my feedback cycle is largely locked to the calendar. But my wife absolutely loves it so far.

I'm not sure if this is snark or not, but yes, there is something fundamentally interesting about the fact that "personal finance tracker" is now a project with the same craft valence as a todo list, the "hello world" of the last 20 years of programming. It also says something new about todo list programs, and programs of that ilk/level of complexity: they're now subthreshold programming, or, the way I look at things, a level of programming now accessible to nonprogrammers.

1. be the kind of guy who thinks more LOC = more betterer

2. ask an LLM to do the needful and never ever look at the results except to count LOC

With some models, if you're not forcefully terse, probably 28k LOC of comments!