Sure, and I do my own accounting in Google Sheets. Each brand that I own is pretty simple, so this isn't that hard (and it's important to me that I do it myself to maintain context on my businesses).
That's why an LLM is good for bookkeeping for me - I'm not actually using the books in any strategic capacity, and I know the numbers in the business well enough that I'll catch any obvious mistakes. The books are purely to give to my CPA to do my taxes at the end of the year.
Maybe, though you might be surprised - first Upwork guy I hired did insanely bad work that was obviously horribly wrong, and I ended up getting it all refunded.
But in any case, tremendous errors won't actually cause me big problems, because I'd catch them on my review of the P&L. Small errors I might miss (whether committed by human or LLM), but they're not going to be material anyway.
I own a number of brands that sell on Amazon, and I've always used an app called HighFive that automatically sends the email you've almost certainly seen that asks you to rate something you bought (without it you have to click a button on each order to send it).
It's always been free, but because of a change to the way Amazon charges third party app devs, they were going to start charging next month. Since the whole app is just a couple of API calls and storing a record of which orders you've sent the request to already, Claude Code built it in 5 minutes.
In general, the Amazon Seller UI is a cluster (especially since I have one account for each brand, so I constantly have to switch between them). There are lots of subscription apps to make your Amazon data more useful and accessible, but Claude Code with access to the Amazon APIs pretty much replaces all of them. I spend very little time in the actual Amazon UI now and mostly just ask my trusty assistant for the info that I need.
> automatically sends the email you've almost certainly seen that asks you to rate something you
Just FYI, most of us maintain blacklists of sellers who do that and would never give business to one again, even if it requires paying more. If I bought something from you, that is not permission to email me anything other than a tracking number. Ever. If i like it -- i'll review it mysef. If i dislike it -- i'll email you. Note the direction of comms here.
Making you click a button per-order was perhaps Amazon's way to add friction to this -- to avoid poor users being spammed with endless review requests. I am sad that someone automated the friction away. I hope that one day amazon starts charging sellers a nontrivial fee per such email sent.
It'd be (insert noun) and the first one is far and away the best but on the big picture you are absolutely correct that it is fantastic. Children of Time (first one) is maybe my favorite book ever.
Yes Children of Time is very good. Tchaikovsky is excellent at portraying alien/non-human minds. You can tell he studied zoology and psychology at university.
Children of Time so very good, it is in the top 5 of my favorite books of all time. I enjoyed the second one as well, and found the third one to be a bit inconsequential and I didn't re-read it when I re-read part 1 and 2.
> He’s not wrong, but it does make me wonder: even if the code was not the point, what do you do if it was the thing that brought you joy?
You still write the code! We do lots of things that could be done more efficiently. People build their own furniture and make their own clothes and brew their own beer. If you love doing something for its own sake, keep doing it.
This is 100% an AI generated post. Incredibly disappointing to see this stuff making its way to HN. If you want to promote your school, at least write a post yourself.
> I'm not sure the approach of "completely autonomous coding" is the right way to go.
I suspect the author of the post would agree. This feels much more like a experiment to push the limits of LLMs than anything they're looking to seriously use as a product (or even the basis of a product).
I think the more interesting question is when the approach of completely autonomous coding will be the right way to go. LLMs are definitely progressing along a spectrum of: Can't do it -> Can do it with help -> Can do it alone but code isn't great -> Can do it alone with good code. Right now I'd say they're only in that final step for very small projects (e.g. simple Python scripts), but it seems like an inevitability that they will get there for increasingly large ones.
I'll start by saying that in my past life I was a PM, and from that angle I can very much see how people writing code for large-scale, production systems take real issue with the quality of what LLMs produce.
But these days I run a one-man business, and LLMs (currently Claude Code, previously GPT) have written me a ton of great code. To be clear, when I say "great" I don't mean up to your standards of code quality; rather, I mean that it does what I need it to do and saves me a bunch of time.
I've got a great internal dashboard that pulls in data from a few places, and right now CC is adding some functionality to a script that does my end of month financial spreadsheet update. I have a script that filters inbound leads (I buy e-commerce brands, generally from marketplaces that send me an inordinate amount of emails that I previously had to wade through myself in order to find the rare gem). On the non-code front, I have a very long prompt that basically does the first pass of analysis of prospective acquisitions, and I use Shortcut.ai to clean up some of the P&Ls I get (I buy small e-commerce brands, so the finances are frequently bad).
So while I can't speak to using LLMs to write code if you're working in any sort of real SaaS business, I can definitely say that there's real, valid code to be had from these things for other uses.
One of my friends did a job for a government. He generated the code for it with some LLM. It provided a result which was about what he thought should be. He - or anybody - never checked the code whether it really calculated what it should have. “It did what [he] needed it to do”. Now the said government started to make decisions based on a result which proved by nobody. In other words, lottery.
What you mentioned doesn’t mean anything until there is no hard proof that it really works. I understand that it seems to you that it works, but I’ve seen enough to know that that means absolutely nothing.
Thanks, I can relate to the parent poster, and this is a really profound comment for me. I appreciate the way you framed this. I’ve felt compelled to fact check my own LLM outputs but I can’t possibly keep up with the quantity. And it’s tempting (but seems irrational) to hand the results to a different LLM. My struggle is remembering there needs to be input/query/calculation/logic validation (without getting distracted by all the other shiny new tokens in the result)
The problem with e-ID is its focused on identity verification, not just age verification and that's where the problem lies.
We still need the ability to be psuedoanonymous online. We should be able to verify age without divulging any identifying information to the service requesting age verification.
An e-ID registry could work on a sort of public/private key system so long as the services requesting informatino from the registry only receives a yes or no of "is this person old enough" and no further information.
If an e-ID can vouch you are citizen number #3223423, it should be able to use the same crypto to vouch that your birth date predates a threshold, without revealing anything else. It's more a question of requirements gathering & UX (and political will).
> Once issued, the e-ID will be stored in a secure digital wallet application on the user’s smartphone or other compatible device.
That sounds like Apple & Google-blessed Android only, open source gadgets and non-Microsoft desktops not supported. Estonia at least used smart cards where a reader can be plugged into just about anything.
I'm obviously not going to show my id to Zuckerberg's website or any porn sites, casinos because I don't trust those bastards. They're also not the police, so they lack the proper autoritah to request my an id.
I think the point of the comment you are answering to is that in Switzerland, they are building a system where you can prove your age without telling who you are to the website, and without telling which website you visit to your government.
The government might not know which website exactly, but the fact that you are looking to verify your age is in itself a datum that you might not want the government to know. "Palata was either looking at porn or buying drugs in January 2026" is probably not something you want the government to know, even if the specifics are obscure.
It doesn't have to be exclusively digital. You can be psuedoanonymous using some form of key as verification. To get a key, you have to present your ID in person at, for example, the social security office or local DOL.
All the key does is attest that "this person is over X years old" with no other identifying information associated with it.
I think blending in person & digital together is going to be the best way forward. Like going to the store and buying alcohol. I have little privacy risk from the cashier glancing at my ID for a second to check my birth date.
> I have little privacy risk from the cashier glancing at my ID for a second to check my birth date.
Imagine your abusive ex is looking for you. She could go to a few alcohol vendors in the area and tell them "Respectful cashier, I suspect that my husband is reverting back to being an alcoholic. If you see the birthdate 1971-06-21 then please phone me after he leaves".
To which the vender replies "Why on earth would I check if someone over the age of 50 might be under the age of 18 (or 21 in some parts of the world)".
Well, I did have many more recent exes in my early twenties than I do in my fifties.
But also the mechanics of the check might be important. For instance, I always go to take the baby out of the back seat when I park, even though I have not driven a baby in years. Because I do not want to ever risk leaving a baby unattended in a car. The store policy might be to check every ID, even in seemingly obvious cases.
But that would require the government to set up the system that lets you present your ID and get a key. They haven't done that, so it's not valid to blame businesses for not using it.
> with no other identifying information associated with it
Not possible, the key itself becomes identifying information similar to how an IP address + timestamp is identifying information even though their is no information abut you stored in the IP address or timestamp.
A digital ID, like someone said below. But people (in the UK at least) go mental about that, despite the government already having all the information anyway. Creating a easy way to securely share that information with a 3rd party for online verification is apparently the work of the devil.
In the real world you turn up in person with a passport, or maybe use snail mail as a way to verify an address which is hard to fake.
Online we have to pretend it is still the internet of the 90s where it's all just chill people having a fun time using their handle...
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