ai.darefail.com

I want to track my purchases as soon as they come in.

If you look at Plaid or Stripe Financial Connections they at best claim every 4 hours but more realistically it's about 24 hours and constantly breaks.

If you ask any bank to give you live access to their transactions they will claim its impossible or send you into a multi year long process for becoming a "partner".

Finally, there are companies (usually in the credit card rewards space) out there that do give access to this live but charge at least $5,000 a month and want a year long contract.

This is all pretty funny because I log in to my bank account for free every day and it magically has my purchases instantly.

this actually controls and refreshes the capital one website directly to pull out the transactions i have one running on a tab for each account https://t.co/iUzagPzqV6 pic.twitter.com/YIdLxjJIh0
— James Steinberg (@DareFailed) October 6, 2025

Now I have a lot of accounts so I am refreshing a lot of tabs. If you do this for 5-10 minutes the website will start to recognize you as a bot and start to ask you to authorize in your app or log in again.

So I put on a Raspberry Pi and hooked up a USB mouse to jiggle inbetween.

to make the budget app live i keep refreshing the page every 30 seconds, i moved the chrome extension to a raspberry pi to run indefinitely
to keep capital one from blocking it as a bot i have two motors jiggling the mouse https://t.co/SQGHevBJCx pic.twitter.com/cz2E5kgGbO
— James Steinberg (@DareFailed) October 5, 2025

The end result is in a fun infinite canvas at the end but I am going to go through some other steps since I don't actually know how to make chrome extensions.

I didn't want to vibe code this. I wanted to actually learn. Someone from the OpenAI team made a val with a bunch of live AI streaming stuff already built in.

which itself was a project that i had to start out testing with how fast and good ai transcription is in general

a lot of times saying programming terms make it think i am speaking spanish or mongolian pic.twitter.com/F4UKHr6KOI
— James Steinberg (@DareFailed) October 6, 2025

The most important part of how your voice streams to OpenAI is right here:

The next thing to test was how annoying the live conversation would be, turns out pretty annoying but surprisingly fast.

and then i wanted to see how fast it could respond and if it got annoying, turns out the initial prompt matters a lot with how good it is pic.twitter.com/Arnsg8UsHe
— James Steinberg (@DareFailed) October 6, 2025

I had to mess with the INSTRUCTIONS prompt a lot to make it listen to me and be helpful.

Finally I started pair programming which was frustrating at times but less annoying than my lab partner at Northeastern.

i had to learn how to make chrome extensions which i could do copying and pasting with llms but i wanted to actually learn myself so i had an ai pair programming with me - this is a val someone at openai made pic.twitter.com/38xd9F4c4s
— James Steinberg (@DareFailed) October 6, 2025

The final result in an infinite canvas!

made a hacky live budget canvas to judge my spending choices with a valtown and tldraw pic.twitter.com/NJ2DnM3F1w
— James Steinberg (@DareFailed) October 3, 2025

I plan on opensourcing some version of this but it is very specific to Capital One and has some stuff directly related to me at the moment.

One of the more fun things I calculated is every dollar over my budget I spend is 588 seconds I am delating my financial freedom. It really makes me reconsider that Soda.

Creating a Live Budget App on a Budget