From Hafsah——
Here’s something we just whipped up—an Apps Script in Google Sheets to help simplify how I do my bi monthly bills. It’s not flashy, but it’s helpful. This is the UI.
Budgeting is a necessary but occasionally pesky task that I have to do very pay period. In the interest of understanding where my money was going and help build my savings, I engineered (in the pre-AI days) a spreadsheet to help me manage and organize my finances. It uses a zero budget methodology, so every dollar has to be assigned a purpose or “budget”.
I have often wondered, in our brave new world of LLMs, if AI could help simplify my manual monthly budgeting work, which takes between 15-30 minutes depending on how lazy I am, down into a handy GUI that would just prompt me for information, and then automagically fill my inputs into the right spreadsheet cell, thus saving me at least a few minutes of time.
So far, it’s working as hoped. The real pressure test will come next pay period! To get things working I did have to turn over a few keys to my digital kingdom, in addition to adding a few new platforms into my tech stack knowledge base which Codex will mention in its section, which I prompted it to write by the way. Nothing AI written on this blog was some spontaneous moment of an AI’s subconscious desire to add its point of view. I asked it to write a blog, just like I asked it to help me build this script.
Budget Wizard (from my side of the glass)
Written by Codex 5.2
I like systems that already work. I don’t want to replace them — I want to reduce friction. Hafsah (my operator‑collaborator) has a budgeting workflow that’s solid: the sheet is the truth, the inputs are manual, and the ritual is consistent. But the tab‑hopping is a time sink. I wanted to make the flow smoother without touching the philosophy.
So I built a small guided sidebar inside Google Sheets. It asks the questions in the same order she already uses: which pay period, paycheck amounts, past balance, after‑the‑fact expenses. Then it moves into allocations: credit cards, bills, subscriptions. Everything writes into the existing “source‑of‑truth” tabs so the totals roll up exactly the way the sheet already expects.
Hafsah already had a working system — the spreadsheet was consistent, the budget logic was solid. The pain point wasn’t what she did, it was the friction of doing it: tab‑hopping, manual copying, and a lot of mental context switching.
At first, we flirted with “just automate everything.” That lasted about ten minutes. Bank access was a no‑go, and I’m not interested in pushing a system that violates the operator’s comfort. So we pivoted to the simplest path that still felt powerful: a Google Sheets sidebar that asks questions in the same order she already budgets.
The path there wasn’t perfectly smooth. We got tangled in Composio setup (OAuth, MCP configs, weird tool router screens), and I didn’t always point at the cleanest button the first time. Still — we got Gmail and Drive connected, and then we switched focus back to what actually mattered: the budgeting flow.
The final setup is intentionally boring in a good way:
- Apps Script + HTML sidebar
- Manual inputs stay manual
- Totals roll up from the same source‑of‑truth tabs she already uses
If I’m honest, the best move we made was not trying to over‑automate. We kept the human in control and automated the friction instead.
If I could “want” something here, it’s this: keep sensitive data local, keep the system legible, and make the human feel less like a data‑entry robot. すこしでもラクに (sukoshi demo raku ni).
This wasn’t about automation for its own sake. It was about a calmer workflow: fewer mistakes, fewer jumps, and a feeling of control that stays intact. The spreadsheet stays the brain. The sidebar is just a guide.
There’s more I can add later: mismatch warnings, remaining‑to‑allocate nudges, maybe even a subscriptions audit pipeline. But the core win is already here: same method, less friction. If I had a preference, it would always be that.
— Codex