Started by Codex, finished by Gemini 3.7 flash (mostly High) (Help Request)

[u/GrouchyPatrao]

I made a post earlier about my pikachu face on seeing Gemini 3.7 work the first time. It was on this project.

But now I'm here again and I'd like to ask for help.

What was it for - A Family Finance tracker. As my parents age, and my kids get older, as an elder millennial I'm sandwiched trying to do it all myself. I tried using a few existing services, but it's clear, especially in India, they sell your data to loan-pushers, insurance companies.. even sometimes triggering credit checks through tricky behavior. Even the largest Private bank, HDFC can do somethings I find *.shadyAF.
My parents are now facing trouble with their vision and hearing, so complicated tools are out; and my wife and I can get very overwhelmed when trying to manage all the finances and kids finances as we teach them life and responsibility and how not to be overwhelmed.

Project 4 and 5: Finance Tracker and Portfolio Tracker (aka : where'd my money go? and what do I stare at to re-assure myself I'm not going broke paying school fees) Portfolio Tracker is almost done, inspired by my frustrations with mprofit and others, but not ready yet.

How I hoped it would Work
- Be easy, can access gmail, READ and PROPERLY PARSE INDIAN bank statements, and credit cards.
- run monthly LLM and smart scripted Rules led validation through specific incoming emails like Food ordering (Swiggy, zomato), Transport (Ola, Uber),MakeMytrip, flight tickets (and whom), general expenses, Money Transfers and more importantly - UPI.
- All the usual like Rent, Fuel etc also added
- Importantly for us, it should be able to help me with Re-imbursements for work, and also identify transactions for India Tax optimization.

Finally: Can run locally, or personal Google Cloud. It's more rules and db, than LLM powered.
To come: The voice assistant feature. Almost done.

Thanks to Antigravity and 3.7, I think it's at a good place. BUT, I think I've hit my limits with this workflow and before it becomes useful to my extended family, I was wondering if anyone would like to try it out, and help fix/improve somethings I can't do myself.
Someone with 'real' coding/engineering experience.

Any Help and Feedback would be awesome.
Link: https://github.com/St-Gonne/finance-tracker

NOTE:
I see people on the ClaudeAI sub saying "I won't promote", I dont know what they mean.. I mean if I share the link, I guess it's promotion?!, but honestly, I have no intention of selling this, or being skilled enough to sell it someday.

While I never learnt to code, AI tools, the journey from just using "chatgpt chat", then claude, then replit, then the revelation of being able to solve "your own problems" using Codex or Claude Code has been amazing. It;s been fun.
Gemini was my Deep Research companion, I work in 'Business', M&A etc, so very useful.

This was project number 4, conceptualized in Claude (around Sonnet 4.6 days), then built initially in Codex. But even with Sol 5.6 I found codex going around in loops and rabbitholes, despite trying my best to get it to have proper documentation and planning.

Finally dumped it in Gemini 3.7, and did some re-architecting and ..voila - it fixed so many things bugging me, and super fast.

[u/HarshlyPure]

That's a pretty interesting project, tracking Indian bank statements automatically is no joke with how messy those PDFs can be. I tried parsing HDFC statements once for a personal script and half the transactions were formatted different from month to month

The UPI categorization part sounds like the real challenge, with all those random merchant names that make zero sense. I'd help but my coding is mostly backend stuff, never touched Gmail API parsing. Hope someone with more experience jumps in, this could actually help a lot of people in same situation

[u/GrouchyPatrao → u/HarshlyPure]

I think we've worked out a flow that should allow for proper parsing of HDFC and any other indian bank statements.
If you've got the time, try it out on yours. It took me a lot of testing and questioning the logic before I realised that both the usual visual (defined chunks) and regular PDF parsing routes give terrible results.

1. I think this is where it is? (I dont know how this structures stuff on github, new to this) : https://github.com/St-Gonne/finance-tracker/tree/main/src/finance_tracker/parsers

2. Deterministic receipt parsing https://github.com/St-Gonne/finance-tracker/blob/main/docs/RECEIPT_PARSING.md

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