A Geek's Life

It’s that time of the year when HMRC commences sending nagging reminders to file one’s self assessment taxes, even though the deadline is in January of the next year. I usually leave it till late until I am spending half a day organising the paperwork then beating it into a summary for the (online) forms.

This year, I thought I would make an early start and throw AI at. My tax affairs are not particularly complex, for what it is worth – there was a P60 from work, a final payslip which doubled as a P11D, and a few account summaries from the brokerages I use to manage my relatively stable portfolio.

The plan: ask Claude to build an artifact, which would take the requisite pdfs and produce a summary in markdown format of the actual form.

The verdict: Meh. I consistently found errors in the asset categorisation and the number of disposals whilst burning through lots of tokens. It might be that the extract+analyse+summarise requirement veered too far into the generate rather than purely summarise end of the LLM capability spectrum. As I do have a few more months before filing, I’ll just do it by hand as I have the past few years.

Claude, I am still not impressed.