As a child, I remember numerous times my parents and grandparents telling me that I had “chutzpah” when I would listen in on adult conversations and, with the wisdom of a 4- or 5-year-old, loudly and vociferously put in my two cents about topics I knew nothing about, such as the Vietnam war, tackling poverty, or who made the best Manhattans.
But an article I read today clearly jumped to the top of the hill in terms of what epitomizes chutzpah.1
Ryan Lizza, a self-described veteran journalist and editor of Telos News, was preparing his tax return using Turbo Tax and was getting increasingly frustrated with its clunkiness, expense, and constant interruptions with “scammy upsell offers.” So, what does someone who has no tax knowledge, let alone any coding knowledge, do in such a situation?
Build their own tax preparation software using AI Claude Code, of course!
That’s exactly what Ryan did. As he stated, “…in just a few weeks, I created what appears to be a full-featured financial app called ‘Telos Tax’ that prepares complicated federal and state tax returns for free. It’s Turbo Tax on Steroids.”
In a few weeks he directed Claude Code to design an app using 234,000 lines of code that can be used by individuals or tax professionals alike to prepare tax returns. According to Ryan, Telos Tax can handle returns for “the simplest W-2 employee taking the standard deduction to a complex filer with, say, farm income, rental properties, asset depreciation schedules, AMT adjustments, crypto sales, a Roth conversion, net operating loss carryforward, and every imaginable combination of deductions and credits.” It even “gives you a FICO-like score to assess your likelihood of being audited.”
The only problem is that Ryan has no idea if it actually does any of this correctly. As he said, “maybe Claude, in its effort to please, created a Potemkin app that simply fooled me into thinking it was in the same league as a product designed by hundreds of engineers at a Fortune 500 company.”
So, he’s making the app public as a free open-source project so tax pros and actual human coders can vet it.
Now that, my dear readers, is the ultimate definition of chutzpah!
