> The maker of this has taken a deterministic problem (substring matching transaction descriptions) that could be solved with a 50-line Python script
I had a coding agent write this for me last week. :D
It takes an excel export of my transactions that I have to download obviously since no bank is giving out API access to their customers. It uses some python pandas and excel stuff and streamlit to classify the transactions and "tally" results and show on the screen as color coded tabular data. (Streamlit seems really nice but super super limited in what it can do.) It also creates an excel file (with same color coding) so I can actually open it up and check if necessary. This excel file has dropdowns to reclassify rows. The final excel file also has formulas in place to update live. Code can also compare its own programmatic calculations with the result from formulas from excel. Why not? My little coding sweatshop never complains. (All with free models and clis by the way. I haven't had a reason to try Claude yet.)
> "...no bank is giving out API access to their customers..."
I think Citi bank has an API (https://developer.citi.com/). Not that it's public for account holders, but third-parties can build on that. I'm looking at Plaid.com
One thing about Plaid--I've not been happy when encountering Plaid in the wild. For example, when a vendor directs me to use Plaid to validate a new bank account integration. I'd much rather wait a few days and use the 0.01 deposit route. Like using a katana for shaving.
But signing up to use Plaid for bank transaction ingestion via API is a whole different matter.
I had a coding agent write this for me last week. :D
It takes an excel export of my transactions that I have to download obviously since no bank is giving out API access to their customers. It uses some python pandas and excel stuff and streamlit to classify the transactions and "tally" results and show on the screen as color coded tabular data. (Streamlit seems really nice but super super limited in what it can do.) It also creates an excel file (with same color coding) so I can actually open it up and check if necessary. This excel file has dropdowns to reclassify rows. The final excel file also has formulas in place to update live. Code can also compare its own programmatic calculations with the result from formulas from excel. Why not? My little coding sweatshop never complains. (All with free models and clis by the way. I haven't had a reason to try Claude yet.)