Today’s meditation on “what will become of the professions in the era of AI” comes courtesy of my annual family tax returns (late Feb, 2026).
On the plus side:
- I modernized a mediocre process I’ve been using for 15+ years for collecting and processing the physical and online artifacts
- I am giving my accountant a FAR better set of data this year, organizationally and content-wise
- I am coming with a better set of questions and ideas
- There are obvious ways to optimize this process further next year, including automation, all memorialized in .md
On the “Feb 2026 snapshot side”:
- Gemini Pro 3.1 was best for parsing images of multiple receipts. It maxed out reliably extracting details of about 6-7 receipts per image. (20 receipts it still can’t do with any accuracy “naively”, e.g. using elaborate prompting – I appreciate this is an area heavily covered by SaaS).
- Browser Automation (Playwright here) works great but, used this way, is so obviously a transitional kludge. Now it can grind through service provider sites to download docs. All those services need MCP or a CLI or .. anything an Agent can use to access the data.
On the “I oscillate between extreme excitement and dread” front:
- At what point are am I comfortable just doing family taxes with AI?