Penny
Inspiration
Managing money creates a lot of mental load. I already had my financial data organized in Google Sheets through Tiller, but actually using that information still meant opening spreadsheets and digging through reports. I wanted to be able to text my finances as if I was texting my spouse and ask questions like - "What caused us to spend so much money last month?" or "How much are we spending on Amazon each month?"
What I Built
Penny is a conversational money manager that lives in WhatsApp.
Ask questions like:
"What did we spend on eating out compared to groceries over the last six months?"
Penny understands the question, queries my financial data in Google Sheets, and replies with the answer!
How I Built It
- Twilio
- GPT-5.6
- Google Sheets
- Tiller
- GitHub
- Codex
One of my favorite discoveries during Build Week was using Codex as part of my normal GitHub workflow. I broke the project into GitHub Issues, had Codex implement each feature on its own branch, reviewed the pull request, tested it myself, and merged it into main. It felt like collaborating with another engineer.
Challenges
The hardest part was navigating through the Meta Developer / Business Portals to get the API key / tokens etc. I spent an embarrassingly long time screenshotting where I was and asking chatgpt / codex for next steps. Finally I figured out I could turn on browser control in codex and it would navigate to the correct pages for me and all I had to do was paste in the keys to my .env file.
What I Learned
I learned that using browser control in codex is the way to go. I also learned that I could have multiple branches going in codex at the same time! I had one chat spin up my marketing page to be deployed on GitHub pages, I had another chat document the brand guidelines, while the another branch was a senior engineer implementing the dev plan against the github issues I outlined. It was like have a front-end engineer, design, and back end dev all working together! (including documentation!)
What's Next
Sky is the limit for Penny to become your family's money manager - you can have a group chat with your spouse and kids. Penny could be set up to text you your checking/savings/credit card balances each morning. Reminders to file your taxes or pay estimated tax. All the things a human has to remember to remember now... Penny can do.
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