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He got tired of badly formatted PDF financials, so he built a converter that turns a quarter's 25 reports into clean Excel in one batch

He is not a developer; he is a management trainee at a company made up of five entities. Every quarter, full financials go out to the management team: a batch of at least 25 PDFs from their SAGE accounting software, several of them over 20 pages long. He spent weeks reviewing test files and batches and debugging formatting mistakes to build his own converter, after finding that the AI models themselves could not do the job faithfully on larger documents: they would combine rows and categories or produce totals that added up but were not identical. The AI itself told him the task would need a hard coded deterministic app. His converter can now batch format the whole set at once, with the bolding, blank rows, sum lines and column sizing he is picky about.

How it works

  1. Try letting the models convert the files and watch them merge rows on big documents
  2. The AI says the task needs a deterministic app
  3. Build a converter on a PDF parsing library with weeks of test batches
  4. Run the whole quarterly set through it in one batch

Why it’s worth knowing

The honest moment is the model refusing its own job: it told him not to use a model for this.

Where it’s from

Summarized from a public post on reddit.com. See the original ↗

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