· 3 min read
Power Up Your Electricity Bill
Delegating your financial mundane tasks to an AI model is simpler than ever
There’s no doubt that we have all grown accustomed to generative models in practically every task we perform, and it seems like they’ve been here forever, advising and implementing on our behalf.
The Throwaway Code Revolution
But between tools, agents, protocols and architectural best practices, I want to shortly focus on one aspect of AI, perhaps the niche where it excels and eases our life the most: the “Throw Away” code which we use to quickly solve problems, get a straight answer and get on with our lives.
When we want AI models to solve such problems, we don’t really care about maintainability or code quality—we just want an accurate answer to a simple question. It’s a living reminder that today, a considerable amount of code is written to serve a single purpose and then be discarded—with all its merits and drawbacks.
My Electricity Bill Problem
The other day I was looking to switch to one of the new electricity providers that have emerged in recent years. I was gazing at the slew of different options and plans, with just a simple question - which would provide me with the cheapest bill by the end of each month?
Some of them offer a flat, percentage based discount, while others suggest special “family”, “tech” or “night” plans with varying discounts on different days and hours.
Of course, I could calculate it myself or use one of the online providers that could retrieve my yearly kWh consumption and do the math for me. Their only demand is to supply my name and phone number for the purpose of marketing.
Instead - I retrieved a CSV of my personal electricity usage throughout the last year, and gave Claude the most prominent plans available to choose from to let it do the math for me.
As expected, it quickly analyzed what the CSV looks like, and translated the different plans into the different daily time slot they represent. Moments later, I received a detailed report telling me that for my personal usage, a flat discount would work best.
Building a Tool for Everyone
While I am already at it, I thought, why not create a simple HTML page that would allow anyone to upload their own CSV files and get some answers?
Here’s the result before you, a simple HTML page with local-only processing, no strings attached, no privacy policies or terms of use - just you and your data which is kept private in your browser.
(Disclaimer: This tool comes with no warranties or guarantees regarding the accuracy of calculations.)
