An amazingly good Tiller AI agent

Discussion
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My experiment was a smashing success.

I copied every scrap of Tiller documentation, postings, web page text I could find and pasted it all into a giant text document and then dropped that into a Claude project.

I then used my agent to build out all of my sheets. I asked for a plan, step by step instructions, asked questions along the way, fixed problems, dropped in screenshots of things that didn’t look right, found inconsistencies and more.

I was blown away by how well this works. If there’s interest, I could share my knowledge document.

This could be even better if it were done with a proper AI pipeline with curated/structured data as input.

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I would love to see it.

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I’ve been using ChatGPT in a more passive role (not as an agent) and have found it amazingly helpful, not only with categorization/accounting advice but also in its knowledge of the Tiller Foundation and community templates. Not to mention formula help. I think this topic deserves a new AI tag! (just added one).

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I’m not yet 40 but this makes me feel like I’m twice that. I use ChatGPT for asking questions and getting ideas for stuff, but how do you use it in regards to a spreadsheet??

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That’s a great idea, and I’d like a copy of your knowledge document.
Thx!

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Great. I’m going to try to find some time this evening to package up what I’ve got —both the “knowledge” file and my initial prompt which gave guidance for what I wanted to accomplish

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Great. It’s interesting to hear that ChatGPT already has some degree of knowledge of Tiller. It may be that combining an LLM’s scraped information with more specific/curated information together makes it even smarter

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Consider yourself already well beyond what most people of any age are doing. :slight_smile: What’s interesting is that no LLM I’m aware of is yet able to directly inspect or modify spreadsheets. Not even Google who hosts our Google Sheets. Once they do, things will get even easier. Meantime, LLM’s are still able to infer how to “read” and offer instructions on how to modify spreadsheets. It amazes me that I can even dump a screenshot of my sheet into Claude (using the Sonnet 3.5 model) and it can understand it and offer guidance.

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Here’s an example: a community member asked if there are any Tracking Monthly Card Benefits/Credits solutions out there, with Amex Gold as an example. Not having one of those cards, I asked ChatGPT about it and to clarify what she might be asking for. It answered:

ChatGPT answer to What the User Is Asking For:

The user wants a Tiller-compatible sheet to track recurring credit card benefits, specifically statement credits from premium cards like Amex Gold and Amex Platinum. They are looking for a way to:

  1. List Credits by Account – A table where they enter their Amex (or other credit card) benefits, including the amount, frequency (monthly, semiannual, etc.), and which card it applies to.

  2. Automatically Pull Matching Transactions – A formula or script that checks transactions for relevant purchases that should trigger the credit.

  3. Track Usage vs. Available Credit – A way to see if they’ve received the full credit for each period and a summary of total credits received vs. the maximum allowed.

  4. Toggle a Checkbox or Summary View – An easy way to mark a credit as received or get an overview of credit usage.

Chat GPT answer to How Amex’s Statement Credit Programs Work

Amex offers various spending-based credits on premium cards. These are essentially reimbursement-style benefits, meaning you must make an eligible purchase, and Amex automatically applies the credit to your statement.

Some common credits:

• Amex Gold: $10/month Dining Credit → Applies to certain restaurants, Uber Eats, and select food delivery services.

• Amex Platinum: $20/month Digital Entertainment Credit → Covers services like The New York Times, Audible, and Disney+.

• Amex Platinum: $200/year Airline Fee Credit → Reimburses incidental airline fees (e.g., baggage fees, lounge access, seat upgrades) but not tickets.

• Amex Platinum: $50/Semiannual Saks Credit → Covers purchases at Saks Fifth Avenue, with $50 available from Jan–June and another $50 from July–Dec.

• Hilton Amex (Waldorf/Conrad Credit): $200/year → Applies to stays at select Hilton brands.

Credits typically reset on a calendar basis (monthly, semiannually, or annually), and if not used, they are forfeited.

ChatGPT suggestion on How to Build This in Tiller

This could be done with a custom template that includes:

  1. A “Credits Tracker” Sheet

• Columns for Card Name , Credit Type , Max Credit Amount , Frequency (Monthly, Annual, etc.) , and Next Reset Date .

• A formula to check transactions in the Tiller sheet for qualifying purchases.

  1. A Transaction Lookup Formula

• A SUMIFS formula or a query to pull the total amount spent on eligible merchants/categories each month.

Example (if Amex credits are in “Credits” sheet and transactions are in “Transactions”):

=SUMIFS(Transactions!D:D, Transactions!B:B, "Uber Eats", Transactions!A:A, ">="&E1, Transactions!A:A, "<="&EOMONTH(E1,0))

• This would sum Uber Eats transactions for the month (where E1 is the first of the month).

  1. Conditional Formatting or a Checkbox

• A checkbox column (TRUE/FALSE) to mark if a credit was successfully received.

• Conditional formatting to highlight unused credits before expiration.

  1. A Summary Section

• Total Credits Used vs. Available (by card, by month, or annually).

• Visual indicators (:white_check_mark: or :red_circle:) to track usage.

Has This Been Done in the Tiller Community?

There isn’t an official template for this yet, but some users track credits manually in Categories or with Tags in Transactions. This idea would improve automation and visibility.

Would you like help drafting a Google Sheets template for this? :rocket:

Now, I didn’t take it beyond that, but it’s an example…

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I’d love your knowledge document if you’re willing to share!

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This could be something…haven’t dug into this yet: SheetGPT

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Just tried the SheetGPT addon, but it doesn’t appear useful for Tiller users. Seems to be more about content creation, marketing, etc…details here.

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I am interested in seeing your writeup on this!

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Sorry for the delay, y’all. I’m now posting the documents that I used to build my Tiller “agent”.

You can download the three documents from here: Notion – The all-in-one workspace for your notes, tasks, wikis, and databases.

You should know up front that I’m using Anthropic’s Claude with the “3.5 Sonnet” model and that I have their $20 per month “Professional” subscription which enables their “project” feature. A project lets you upload document files to serve as “knowledge” for prompts and these stay around across sessions.

You may be able to use their free version to get results by pasting my documents into the prompt itself, but that’s iffy because together they’re pretty large and may exceed the “context window” size for a prompt.

My advice: Sign up for a month of of Claude’s professional plan to play with it and cancel before it renews. I use it constantly for work and personal things and I think it pays for itself quickly.

Documents

TillerProductSummary.txt

This is a page of text that summarizes what Tiller is. I think I just selected and copied the text from a page on the Tiller website and pasted it into this text file. Not sure how important this is, but you might as well include it.

CurrentSheets.txt

This is the big one. It has all the information I could find on each Tiller sheet I’m using, copied from the website and just pasted into a big, long, ugly-ass text file. This is my “knowledge” document. Each time I prompt my agent, it’s using this as its “smarts” together with whatever other knowledge it already has about Tiller from scraping the internet. I did give the document a little structure, breaking it into sections for each of the Tiller sheets that I’ve started with. As I tell the AI, these sections are bounded with special character sequences.

Prompt.txt

This is the prompt that I started my conversation with. This is where some of the magic is. I’m using some important prompting techniques here. I’m defining my goals, my background, the level of my expertise, and explaining what I’ve done so far. Then I tell the AI who it is, how I want to work with it, and I ask it to read my documents. An important thing: AI’s are trained to be subservient, overly-nice, praiseful, and to follow your lead way too much. You need to tell it to not be nice and push back if it thinks it’s right. You’ll want to customize this file for your own self and goals.

Steps

  1. Log into your Claude account and go to Claude
  2. Click on the “Claude” text at the upper left of the window
  3. Click the “Projects” item to reveal the “Projects” page
  4. Click the “Create Project” button at the upper right of the window.
  5. Enter your project name.
  6. Enter a short description. Something like “Getting my finances in order using Tiller spreadsheets”.
  7. On the new project page, click the “Add Content” button and upload the “TillerProductSummary” and “CurrentSheets.txt” files.
  8. Make sure you’re using the “3.5 Sonnet” model. Look for the popup button at the bottom left of the white prompt field.
  9. In the prompt field (labeled “How can Claude help you today”), paste in the contents of the “Prompt.txt” file and click the up-arrow button to submit it.

At this point you’re ready to start a conversation. Having some previous experience with prompting will be helpful. Basic advice: Pretend you’re talking to a real human being —an idiot savant who is exceptionally brilliant and insightful in some ways and utterly clueless in others. The quality of the help you get will depend on the quality of your prompts. Provide as much context as you can in your questions. Be verbose. You need to be on guard for hallucinations. Challenge things that don’t seem right. Ask to break things down into steps. Take screenshots of your sheets and add them to your prompts.

Happy to answer questions here

Aside: I’m a software engineer with some experience building AI pipelines. If anyone is interested in building a proper agent, let me know.

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With an earlier version of chatGPT, I was able to paste in a chunk of Excel, and ask for help creating formulas. it worked great. (it’s been 6+ months since I tried)

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What is the difference between Claude and ChatGPT? Or is it personal preference? Thanks for the tip, so many great use cases for everyday tools being up-leveled through AI

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What specifically did it help with in regards to “build out all of my sheets”. The default sheets seem pretty straight forward already, add accounts, add categories, pull transactions. I could see AI being useful in setting up AutoCat and your initial categories but it would need to see all your transactions first and infer best it can what they are. Which I imagine could be difficult for it. Did you have it do anything beyond what I described here? Cheers

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To answer your question, I first have to do something I hate doing: Admit to myself and to the world that I’m not as smart as other people.

I’m a software engineer and am no stranger to things like formulas, and I’ve used a number of home accounting programs over the years, so I have a basic understanding of accounting principles.

Tiller is has the best balance between power and programmability of any system I’ve found. That said, it has a large “surface area” and requires that you know which sheets will meet your needs and requires that you understand how they connect to each other.

One of the things I really like about Tiller is that it can give me projections into my future: money over days of upcoming months, over years, and then into retirement. Those sheet are really good. Understanding how they relate to the basic sheets and how to fill in things like “life events” was very far from obvious for me. That was super tricky to get right, to be honest, and this is an area where my AI was essential for me.

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