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Comment by badlibrarian | Hacker News Reader

I have a business. Sometimes I buy things on Amazon. At tax time, I search for the big business items and categorize them in QuickBooks until I give up.

You know who doesn't give up? Claude, who doesn't seem to realize how shitty and slow QuickBooks Online is. It's even happy to click 19 times to do a split because I dared to add a router and shampoo to the same Amazon cart in a weak moment of convenience one night back in February 2025.

Some so-called skills are worth letting atrophy. Whatever I used to do with a janky browser plugin and two monitors full of Excel windows at tax time is one of them.

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AI's superpower might be it's ability to serve as versatile and easy to use interface on top of systems with terrible UI, inconsistent data, etc.

DELIBERATELY terrible UI

I wonder if you could get claude to serve up amazon in a reasonable way:

- the search terms you asked for

- filter out results you want to remove

- no sponsored results

- no recommendations

for example, say I don't want "smart" <something>. I can't get rid of them from the results. "not smart" uses smart as a search term. Not only that, amazon devices always show up, I drown in sponsored results, and a good part of the page is my shopping cart, recommendations, and sometimes ask alexa popups.

Amazon does not want this. The more stuff you wade through, the more ad revenue they get. The more impulse sales they get. The more amazon devices they sell. (and then amazon devices become a surveillance cash register sitting in your house)

I agree that ecommerce interfaces (with the exception of McMaster-Carr) are all terrible. However, the next phase will probably leapfrog "make the interface better" to have a concierge agent do the shopping, or at least present a tight list of options and pros/cons.

> Whatever I used to do with a janky browser plugin and two monitors full of Excel windows at tax time is one of them.

Yeah the amount of time the taxman has wasted in my life is beyond belief. I automated a lot of it myself over the years but now having the help of LLMs to fill the bullshit, pointless, Brazilian (the movie, not the country) crap to please mister taxman is a godsend.

How do you know it’s doing it correctly and not walking you into tax fraud?

By running a Tax Summary report and looking at it, just like I always did. Except this time, with fresh eyes and in a good mood. It's still just a bookkeeper and frankly does a more thorough job than I did.

notably, in my experience book keepers have been doing a terrible job since COVID, often committing what seem to be highly negligent mistakes. so i’m really not sure that is a compliment. but does seem to be somewhat useful?

the only way I found out w/ my bookkeeper was reviewing individual entries

Indeed. I can't imagine I'm the only one signing amended returns this week after having LLMs take a peek at the last three years of tax filings.

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