budget bully

Second Cup is not budget bully approved :(
Windsurf!
Meet the team

Inspiration

As a team of math, stats, and finance majors whose preferred mode of communication is light bullying, we wanted to create an app that incorporated a bit of each element. What better way to incorporate these than by a budgeting app that generates remarks, both insulting and sarcastic, as you enter your income and expenses while paying homage the the early aughts.

What it does

Our project, budget bully not only helps users to keep track of their earnings and spending, but also generates helpful charts that provide valuable and useful insight. As a fun twist, budget bully will comment on the users inputs, insulting their choices when entering a non-essential expense and utilizing sarcasm when money comes in or good choices are made. The charts include two donut charts that track loan repayments and savings, which are easily updated to follow the ebbs and flows of life and debt. Another chart is a stacked bar graph that compares day to day transactions broken down by the predefined categories. The bar graph can also be grouped by week, month, and year.

How we built it

We used windsurf as a code editor for budget bully. Through this, we utilized a variety of models to write code, including SWE-1, GPT 4.1, Gemini 2.5, Claude Sonnet 4, Claude Opus 4.

For the generated roasts, we employe dolphin-mistral in ollama, an ai that isn’t afraid to say “hold my purse” as it hurls insults in the users direction.

Challenges we ran into

A challenge we ran into was generating a third type of graph, a time series line chart that would compare total spending across days, weeks, months, and years. While not that different from the bar graph, sometime seeing the changes between data points helps to highlight the percentage change better. Unfortunately, as we attempted to generate these charts with multiple different models, each presented a different issue. Important pieces of code were broken or removed entirely. For example, one iteration left us unable to enter an amount for any item entered while another deleted the categories all together.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Sticking with our idea! Many participants today had beautiful and innovative ideas for their projects, leaving us questioning whether a budgeting dashboard could compete. However, budget bully is designed to help make budgeting a little easier, whether the roasts make you laugh or genuinely inspire you to do better, budget bully appeals to the like-minded, bullying-is-a-love-language people out there.

What we learned

Vibe coding is fun! As a team that has not officially used vibe coding before, it has been very cool to see the possibilities of ai code editors.

Another (sad) thing we learned that while windsurf is incredible useful and intuitive, it does not back up data well without the proper infrastructure. Next time, we would definitely recommend setting up a version management software (such as GitHub) and pushing regularly to avoid losing valuable time and work.

What's next for budget bully

Adding the ability for users to customize colour, font, and emojis would be an ideal next step for budget bully. Perhaps we will look more into additional charts that can continue providing valuable insight for users.