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Comment by mrdependable | Hacker News Reader

Why is your babysitting bill so complicated?

There are several different types of work they can do, each one of which has a different hourly rate. The time of day affects the rate as well, and so can things like overtime.

It's definitely a bit of an unusual situation. It's not extremely complicated, but it was enough to be annoying.

Jesus, are you ok? Can’t you just, like, give em a 20 when you get home?

I find it quite funny you’ve invented this overly complex payment structure for your babysitter and then find it annoying. Now you’ve got a CLI tool for it.

why assume the billing model is being imposed by the customer rather than the service provider?

GP has provided an anecdote with no supporting evidence, nor any code examples. So it is as fair to assume the story is a fabrication as much as it is to assume it has any truth to it

Yes! You should absolutely always assume a random stranger on HN is outright lying about a trivial anecdote to farm meaningless karma.

Or instigating conflict?

What...what conflict do you think I'm instigating, exactly? Whether the command line is a better interface than Excel?

I am really shocked at the response this trivial anecdote has gotten.

I could state it much more generically: we had an annoying Excel sheet that took ~10 minutes a week, I vibe coded a command line tool that brought it down to ~1 minute a week. I don't think this is unusual or hard to believe in any way.

I didn't choose the payment structure, and the point is that a CLI is not a high bar. Something that we used to spend ~10 minutes a week on with spreadsheets is now ~1 minute/week.

Why didn’t you work out a more manageable billing structure with them?! Or to put it another way: if it took you 10 minutes a week with spreadsheets to even figure out what their bill is, how on earth did they verify your invoices were even correct? And if they couldn’t—or if it took more than 10 minutes each week—why wouldn’t they prefer a billing system they could verify they were being paid correctly?

Jesus! is this HN or personal finance forum? Who cares why they do it a certain way. Did they ask for your advices?

If you work like this in a company, you’ll end up with overcomplicated mess.

Now, people with Claude Code, are ready to produce a big pile of shit in a short time.

I’m not trying to give advice, I’m just curious about their arrangement. When I did consulting, I hated billing, and would have wanted a system that was as easy as possible.

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