[Razengan]

I may try that, but at this point it's already more work wrestling with the AI than just doing it myself.

The most important factor is confidence: After seeing them get some things mixed up a few times, I would have to manually verify the output myself anyway.

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Re: the multiple comments that suggest to ask AI for code instead of feeding data to the chatbot:

I get what you mean, but I WANT the AI's non-deterministic AIness in this case!

For example, in some countries there are these "omni apps" that can be used for ride hailing or ordering food etc. The bank statement lists all such transactions with the same merchant name. I want the AI to do its AI thing to guess which transactions were rides and which were food deliveries, based on the prices and times etc. Like if there are multiple small transactions those are taxis, and the most expensive transactions during a day are my lunch and dinner.

And there are other cases, that would be too much "imperative" code that would fail anyway.

Like I said, this is a task that any human could do easily after a short explanation, but takes a hell of a lot of wrangling with AI.

[CPLX]

I had the same vague impression as you did when using AI via browser/chat interaction. Like it’s very impressive but how useful is it really?

Using it via the CLI approach as an entirely different experience. It’s literally shocking what you can do.

For context, among many other things I have done this exact thing I am recommending. I just hit export on a Quickbooks instance of a complex multimillion dollar business and had Claude Code generate reports on various things I wanted to optimize and it just handles it in seconds.

The real limit to these tools is knowing what to ask for and stating the requirements clearly and incrementally. Once you get the hang of it, it’s literally shocking how many use cases you can find.

[scotty79]

I think a good mental model of what you can expect from a chat bot is imagining that somebody read tje bank statement to you and them asked you a bunch of questions. Could you follow that, not make smy mistakes, not forget anything? Cam you perform the task "from the top of your head", not writing anything down, not pulling up excell or a calculator? If you can there's a good chance AI will be able to do that too. The fact that it sometimes can do more is pure miracle. And if you want it to do those things consistently you need to provide it with access to the tools you'd need to perform thus task consistently.

[Razengan]

> somebody read the bank statement to you…

But it's not that. I'm GIVING it the data.

It's simple, I can do it myself:

Go row by row. See a certain phrase in the transaction description? Look a few rows ahead. Spot associated fees with just a glance. Write that group of transactions down somewhere else.

That's it.

I tried different kinds of prompts, from imperative to declarative, including telling the AI to write a script for its own internal use, but they just don't seem to get it.

[scotty79]

AI has purely linear input channel. It gets tokens one by one. Context is a form of short term memory. I know, that because you give it written text it seems like you provide it with a document it should be able to process in any way it likes, but the system is set up as if you read the document to AI, word by word and asked questions about it, that it needs to answer "of the top of its head".

> It's simple, I can do it myself:

> Go row by row. See a certain phrase in the transaction description? Look a few rows ahead.

Can you do it without looking at the document? Just by ear? Every time correctly? Without missing something?

[Razengan]

Whatever the reasons/excuses, the initial assessment stands: AI is still far from "butler" level assistance with anything much beyond simple tasks.

Maybe by next Christmas?

[scotty79]

I think you can find what you are looking for in agentic AIs that can use tools, write programs and execute them even today.

In short, you are holding it wrong. ;-)

[dgacmu]

This is exactly why you have it write code instead of analyzing the data. You can have tests, you can inspect then code, you know that the process will be deterministic. The chatbot LLMs are a bad match for bulk data analysis on regular, structured data. But they're often quite decent at writing code.

[CPLX]

> Like I said, this is a task that any human could do easily after a short explanation, but takes a hell of a lot of wrangling with AI.

Replying to your edit. It just doesn’t. It’s almost effortless and fast to do exactly what you’re describing, capturing the subjective judgement of AI, to do what you want.

It took me a couple weeks to get very very good at it with good results in the first day or two. If you’re a competent programmer you’ll have the same experience and quickly if you get into the flow that’s being described to you.

I’m the ultimate skeptic I understand where you’re coming from but these workflows are crazy powerful.