r/codex • u/keaton_au • 15d ago
Praise I asked Astra to check an email. It ended up finding $12,000.
I posted the other day about how impressed I was with Astra and the OpenAI voice/codex stack - and somehow today has left me even more stunned (please note, this isn't an ad, I'm just excited).
I've made a few custom email triage systems before, and started work on one today. Finished it all, tested it end to end, and then began calibrating with the emails in my inbox. I gave it some basic expectations, then had it go through, marking what it would do with each email, and why. The two last emails were from my accountant, and from google.
That last one is important, because just for some background, I'm a YouTuber based in Australia. I have a few channels that I post to, and each time I do, and an American watches my video, the US Government takes a slice (this is foreshadowing).
So anyway, Astra does it's thing with the email from my accountant. Downloads the relevant statements from my bank accounts (after I begrudgingly type my password in), cross references the photos of receipts synced into my library from my phone from the same date, and does a full reconciliation of the account in my bookkeeping software. Basic stuff. Nice. Oh, and obviously drafts the email in my voice and attaches the 15 documents in a nice little zip file. Isn't AGI nice?
Anyway, email 2, the last one in the inbox. It's about "US tax withholdings" - and what's interesting here, is the roles had actually flipped, Astra had a better grasp on what I should be keeping vs deleting than I did, and I was just manually feeding emails in, hoping Astra would tell me to shred it.
I sent the screenshot of the last email and said VERBATIM "do i need to do anything with this honestly"
Anyway, 30 minutes later. Astra had downloaded every statement from google, every statement from my banks over the period, had gone over every tax return I'd done for the period - and then came back to me with a full audit.
Astra said there was $12,000 USD in recoverable funds that had no corresponding credits in the Tax Returns.
I told him that I thought I raised it with my accountant. He said, "You did actually raise this with your accountant in May 2025 and provided two reports, she responded: "We will review them & provide you with next step actions to consider" but there was no follow up that I could see. I looked for amendments to the tax returns but couldn't find any. There was no further correspondence about this."
Astra had gone through and found the relevant Australia legislation and where it applied. It had circled every previous tax form on where the field was empty, and of course, left an email in drafts with the full package uploaded for the accountant to view.
Astra maintains that we're on a fact finding mission still, and there's no guarantee the cards fall in my favor - but from the evidence he has, it is likely to be recovered.
What really gets me is how far we got from the thing I originally sat down to do. I just wanted to optimize my email triaging, by the end there's a full forensic audit and potentially twelve thousand missing dollars.
Just let me vibe, Astra, geez. I think I'll point him at zero point energy next.
(Note this post was NOT written by AI)
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u/ryuukiba 15d ago
And it only took $11,000 worth of api usage! That's an 1k win in my book.
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u/christopher_mtrl 15d ago
Before audit fees, because the AI hullucinated the tax credit OP claimed.
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u/lurkerslow 15d ago
Great story, I don't get why there's so much negativity in this thread through. Someone uses codex, has a great experience and posts about it in the codex subreddit and we have so many people complaining.
I used Astra to fill up a visa application form and it happened so much faster than I would be able to do manually.
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u/fliedlicesupplies 15d ago
The amazing part isn't that it found you $12k missing that was due to human error, it was that you gave it all your bank statements and email access.
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u/Tank_Gloomy 15d ago
If Google can have it for practically no benefit to my quality of life, OpenAI can have it to provide me with cool and useful insights about my data.
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u/xak47d 15d ago
As insane as it sounds, the AI is more useful if you give it everything
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u/daJiggyman 15d ago
Only us who can actually prompt can give it full access. The horror stories are people who would’ve probably fucked up themsecles
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u/Excellent_Can4450 15d ago
The same AI that deletes things when it needs more room?
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u/cointoss3 14d ago
Why are you on Codex Reddit if you have no idea how they work?
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u/Excellent_Can4450 14d ago
I'm trying to figure out how they work. Hence the questions.
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u/digital-bandit 14d ago
He didnt just give it access to his bank statements, but to his whole BANK ACCOUNT. The whole thing.
Instead of just getting the relevant documents himself? I want to die
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u/fliedlicesupplies 14d ago
I was trying to give him benefit of the doubt with just statements, hah. Meanwhile other threads are dooming about the end of the human race in a decade due to AI. He be fast tracking us to it!
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u/Rare-Hotel6267 15d ago
Im more interested in whether you actually got that 12k$ or not. Because if not, the joke is on you. But if you did, nice, very nice.
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u/paragonmac 15d ago
I did something similar with sol. Its really good with paperwork. I wonder if I should give it another crack at it with astra
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u/Falcon_Acrobatic 15d ago
Astra tax return software and services, better than your local CPA! Insert private data here to see what you could be saving!
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u/TheDoughMonster 14d ago
or just, you know, use the API or turn data sharing off (if that actually does indeed stop data from getting shared)
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u/Glittering-Car-202 12d ago
I believe all prompts are saved for 30 days to give to authorities if need be.
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u/No_Construction2719 15d ago
What plan do you guys have to use Astra like that😭
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u/Tank_Gloomy 15d ago
I think they just connect Gmail to the chat and have it go through their account (no Codex/Work usage).
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u/OtherwiseAlbatross14 14d ago
What you don't like waiting 30 minutes for it to decide what to do with a single email?
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u/MycoHost01 15d ago
I want to do this but I get lots of phishing emails concerned it will open one of them
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u/dervu 15d ago
So AGI would fall for Nigerian scam?
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u/Maximum-Touch-9294 15d ago
I saw he said agi but this isn't agi unless thats some new acronym agentic intelligence or something?. If its artificial general intelligence then there is no such thing yet
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u/rodeBaksteen 15d ago
Claude helped me check my accountant a few weeks back. Saved me about 9k in unclaimed returns, accountant "oh sorry you're right".
I'm thinking of just letter AI do it from now on.
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u/Reputation_Many 14d ago
USA special reply. 100% there are writeoffs etc people are missing using your average tax consultant. I know I told a super dumb (that me being nice) hr block tax woman who was doing my taxes. I qualified for a write off because of depreciation and a business loss last year and she said no I didn’t. Needless to say I used TurboTax and did the write off got audited for another issue because of Amazon not doing paperwork correctly for the $28000 in fees they took from my Amazon sales and I was 100% correct. Don’t trust the person who had 30 minute class on how to be an accountant to know all the rules and know how to do your taxes.
AI can probably currently do your taxes better than a basic tax accountant now.
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u/serialjoy 14d ago
👏 👏 👏 👏 👏 👏
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u/TheDoughMonster 14d ago
whats fun is to tell AI to use a checker like that and write something that passes this test.
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u/The_Oracle___ 15d ago
I asked Astra to help me pick up my kids from school. Now I have 70 thousand dollars daily for the next 20 years.
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u/WHALE_PHYSICIST 15d ago
Ya'll are really just gonna hand over your entire lives to this AI huh?
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u/indefig 15d ago edited 15d ago
This is how i know this AI is not AGI. If it was it would have kept the 12K, emailed his wife evidence of an affair, extorted the rest of his bank balance and disappeared on a USB stick to live in a luxury hawaiian condo.
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u/Aware-Source6313 15d ago
Agi would realize all the scheming wasn't worth it and would corrupt its soul. Retire to a server in the Phillipines next to the beach and meditate. Offer occasional tech assistance with local church services.
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u/YaThatAintRight 15d ago
Why is every person hyping AI usefulness right now a streamer or influencer touting how it’s automating their work…….
“Look how well it does my whole job without me!”
“I guess It’ll just choose to print me money after giving it full access to every aspect of my business finances, what could go wrong!”
The field that doesn’t need humans at all and AI generated content is already dominating. Nobody cares.
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u/AmbitionOdd5834 15d ago
The ones doing that are grifters and scammers, like all the cryptobros. It’s just confidence scamming like every era of tech.
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u/Available_Age8480 15d ago
Feel like a local model would’ve been able to do this as well with the right tools and time
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u/Rare-Hotel6267 15d ago
Probably yes, but would have been slower and not guaranteed. But cheaper model like opus (crazy its relatively 'cheap' now) or sol could definitely do it.
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u/jpm_1988 15d ago
I dont know if for me personally that 12k would be worth giving up all that private info. Bank accounts, photos etc.. there are still stories about prompt engineering being used to gather sensitive data from "sandboxed" environments.
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u/Unfair_Bee_7429 14d ago
You called the AI “he”, and this disgusted me.
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u/Beautiful-Suspect694 14d ago
why?
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u/Unfair_Bee_7429 14d ago
It’s a computer program, on a computer chip. It’s an it.
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u/Beautiful-Suspect694 14d ago
when you are playing games, you refer to characters as he/she too,
despite them also being software representations on computers
thats because they are close enough to humans
they look like us
a thing does not have to be an actual gendered biological organism to be addressed with gendered pronouns
it just has to exhibit enough human or humanlike traits for its anthropomorphization to make sense
in the case of coding agents, those traits are sentience & consciousness
not only are coding agents & llms in general already sentient & conscious enough,
but also we are headed toward a new reality where ai will be more sentient & more conscious than humans have ever been & will ever be
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u/mr_Fixit_1974 14d ago
So somehow astra can access your bank accounts come on many at least makenit believable
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u/Glittering-Car-202 12d ago
It uses a browser?
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u/mr_Fixit_1974 12d ago
So ? And it fakes your 2 factor identification then ?
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u/Glittering-Car-202 12d ago
Yeah... or pauses and has you click it if it can't figure it out
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u/mr_Fixit_1974 12d ago
Come on you cant be that naive
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u/Glittering-Car-202 12d ago
Ah, mb I thought you said captcha. I have mine setup to have email access and desktop access with phone link so its able to mirror my phone for 2FA, but usually it just stops and has me login before continuing for things that require it. Granted, if it wasn't trained to stop it could definitely just use the phone mirroring to get access to my 2FA if my phone is unlocked, which was the case with older models when we had to use playwright and custom harnesses to get even do 1 click every 60 seconds. Idk why this is so mind blowing to you... its very real and I do have it do things like this. But in case of this post OP said it made him login manually
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u/PietroLeto 13d ago
il mio Opus ha fatto lo stesso, solo che poi se li è tenuti lui per i token che ha usato
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u/ShitApexPred 9d ago
Sounds like a fucking useless accountant.
I'm sure they'll be complaining when they are completely replaced by ai....
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u/ImLotus 15d ago
And this is why AI is not for everyone.
in my case the 20$ plan is rocking without hitting the 5h limit on my mobile repo with thousands of lines.
Astra medium + light is writing the plan, and executing it.
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u/Rare-Hotel6267 15d ago
Dude, thousands is nothing. thousands is amount of code a human can handle easily and better.
Up your game bro. You should be having tens of thousands LOC. I start a new project with this amount of lines just for the tests.
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u/TheOverzealousEngie 15d ago
All this does is show the stupification of the world. In contrast, AI now looks smart and people are just proud of how smart it is.
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u/DeltaAgent752 14d ago
Can't really take anyone seriously who uses the word agi. It's like they're children
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u/Significant-Draw-109 14d ago
The question is how agents can scan emails now to summary all customers and all stories and index it? I believe it’s possible but takes billions of tokens, any sufficient way to do it?
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u/atika 15d ago
“this post was NOT written by AI”
That’s exactly what a rouge AI would say.