TL;DR: I used Claude Code to do my 2024 and 2025 federal + state taxes. It worked. It cost ~$0 and took 0 clicks through their stupid wizard.
Now I'm short $100k INTU
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Last week I pointed Claude at my tax folder and said the magic words “do my taxes”
It nailed it. Read my W-2s, 1099s, 1040’s, 8949 and my schedule D. Downloaded the tax forms directly from papa IRS, asked me a few questions about how much agriculture income I’ve had this year (none) and if I’ve finally upgraded from single filing status (nope).
It even carried over the massive losses I’ve accrued listening to this sub the past 5 years.
Federal and State DONE in 15 minutes.
Just to check I ran the same thing through TurboTax to compare (but didn’t pay them) SAME RESULT.
Then I had it write a “skill” so anyone on the internet can do the same thing for free.
This is NOT vibe coding. It’s not even vibe prompting. It’s vibe asking nicely.
Back to TurboTax and $INTU. Here’s the DD:
Actually, first the vendettas. These guys suck. Every year the same thing–
Me: How much? Tell me I’ll pay because I’m a law-abiding guy
IRS: We won’t tell you unless you get them wrong. Sucker. Oh and you gotta pay TurboTax for the privilege of clicking through their stupid form for 2 hours.
You’ve heard the stories about Intuit- they spent $46M in federal lobbying to make taxes more complex. Killed IRS Direct File which would have actually been free and easy.
My favorite is their “Free” product which is free in name only. It’s free as in beer that you pay for.
2024 FTC found them guilty of deceptive advertising- Intuit “engaged in deceptive activities to depict TurboTax as free, even though it was simply untrue.”
$141M settlement for steering 4.4 million low-income customers who were eligible for free filing into paying for TurboTax. Many had incomes under $34,000.
Now for a sliver of actual DD:
TurboTax and ProTax are 29% of Intuit’s revenue with QuickBooks 59%. Stock is down 50% since the peak at $785 in late 2025 on AI fears.
So it’s priced in right? No shot. Stock is at the same price as the 2022 market trough. So we’re at “economy seems bad” valuation not “no one needs our product because AI” valuation.
Let’s look at those comps:
– Shutterstock – Down 88%
– Getty – Down 98%
– Chegg (homework help) – Down 99.2%
Compare to $INTU @ a modest 80% drop from peak would be $157, down from $420 before this week. We’ve got a ways to go.
Bulls will say
What about QuickBooks? QuickBooks is safe for another year. Maybe with AI taking all the jobs, we’ll start more businesses that use QuickBooks. More influencers and coursebois yay. But TurboTax is cooked. Maybe the revenue sticks around this year, but it’s going down the drain next year and the market will know before Q1 earnings. They’re gonna know.
But they just signed deals with Anthropic and OpenAI. These are a joke. The OAI "partnership" is Intuit paying OpenAI $100M to put them in ChatGPT as a widget. TurboTax is paying OAI for the privilege of eating their lunch.
But you can’t eFile This is the only legitimate issue standing in the way of toppling $INTU. Intuit has successfully lobbied against letting joes like you and me eFiling our taxes. So if you use Claude, you gotta mail the forms. Maybe by next year another filing service will let us AI eFile through them. Hell maybe this year. Until then, I’m stealing paper and stamps from work.
But TurboTax Live is growing at 47% YoY! Yes, TurboTax live — where you can chat with a human who will type your questions into Claude — is fully 11% of all of $INTU revenue at $2B. This product has Chegg written all over it.
How can I do my taxes?
1/ Download Claude Desktop
2/ Put your tax stuff in a folder. If you include last year’s return it’ll remind you of all the accounts you used last year
3/ Tell Claude Code or Claude Cowork “Do my taxes." It'll work.
Claude just did my taxes. $INTU is cooked
byu/sqlgenius inwallstreetbets
Posted by sqlgenius
21 Comments
Godspeed
saw a guy in the main thread that said he got audited after using chat gpt.
praying for you op
So how do I get Claude to trade for me and I won’t have losses?
He’ll probably tell me to VOO and chill. He’s probably right…
Last few months I have lost money on the way down, then I tried to ghey bear and I’m losing money the other direction.
No….
The market does seem to agree with you, but I’ll gladly pay $80 or whatever it is to make sure I don’t get fucked in the ass. Trusting AI with anything going to the IRS is a bold move cotton.
I actually really like the Chegg example. This sounds regarded but it kind of makes sense.
Man puts are expensive on this
You’re right, but the drawdown will take a long time.
I like the DD but you might be early, the masses are not on Claude yet, my parents have never used any AI tools. Nobody even uses OAI
What could possibly go wrong using a non-deterministic model to fill out a highly structured very deferminisitic form?
OP is correct but forgets the power of lazyness and marketing.
People can do this. But it requires them to
A. Have all their tax files in a folder.
B. Know how to get claude to read those files
C. Trust an LLM and know that it can do this.
D. Know what correct looks like.
60% of people probably just do taxes on their phone and use the turbotax tools that connect with your bank account etc to get the files there.
Other people use it because they trust that there is someone they can blame at TurboTax if they get it wrong.
If Claude gets your taxes wrong there is nothing you can do about it.
But cheap competitors could come up and take a piece of Intuits pie. So it could happen sooner than later.
Let’s wait for the IRS to get backed to you to see how well Claude did
Also Claude found that the IRS owes me $500k.
Claude will never be a Certified Public Accountant, meaning any error will be 100% your responsibility.
Use Free Tax USA. It works much better than TurboTax, $0 Federal, $15 State, and some reasonably priced add ons if you like. Besides AI, there are better products that are threats to INTU.
The only question is how do you know Claude did your taxes correctly? I guess you’ll find out if the tax refund is reasonable and you don’t get mail from the IRS saying wtf did you do to your forms 😂
Quick question do you guys really feel comfortable putting all of your financial data in the hands of an LLM? That LLM basically knows everything about you now.
freetaxusa has been free and the same quality as turbotax for years.
You just gave Claude all your info! For the $100 you saved, you will be hacked to bits by those who have all your info. Nicely done.
Turbo said I owed $130k in federal so I told gpt to find the mistake and write a blurb to share with TurboTax specialist so they could go into my account and fix it..within 5 mins the turbo specialist had rectify the issue based on GPTs input. Reduced my tax exposure to $30k.
Yeah. Worth the $20 subscription to gpt.
If you did this with less clicks+keystrokes than Turbotax (and accounted for them correctly), then it is mathematically impossible for you have done it correctly.
And I don’t like Turbotax, either.