Show HN: A proof-of-concept formalization of the IRS federal tax forms
The linked repo is 100% vibe coded, but it was built on a handful of principles:- Most tax software derives trust from the party who maintains it (e.g. Intuit, the IRS, etc.)- Vibe coded software lacks this trustworthiness.- Therefore any formalization should build in verifiability and mechanisms that make it possible for users/maintainers to trace claims/interpretations back to authoritative source documents.It's very much a back-burner passive project right now (do not use this for anything real!), but I feel strongly that something like this ought to exist for the public good. I built it to get a sense of what the shape of what such a thing might be.
54 points by RGS1811 - 9 comments
> Most tax software derives trust from the party who maintains it (e.g. Intuit, the IRS, etc.)
Because they have the resources to keep it up to date. And even they get it wrong sometimes. Including the IRS itself: https://www.irs.gov/e-file-providers/known-issues-and-soluti...
It's also something that can be made more achievable by pruning coverage to the most common tax situations. E.g. my target coverage for this project is 80% of federal filers, individuals only. This is a lot more achievable than achieving coverage for all individuals plus businesses, etc.
I hope your joking.
In my case, I had an Inherited IRA that, and this is the first year I have to take a distribution from it. It needs to be emptied in 10 years and starting this year I have a minimum amount to take out based on my age. My goal was to write a simulation of how much I take out each year, what that does to my income taxes, how much tax deferred growth I get by leaving it, etc. I have an optimizer to connect to the simulation, so I could then figure out how much I should take each year.
I decided to vibe it, just for fun. I started very simply: write me a simulation for each year with this much projected growth, etc. The AI asked me some questions like "do you have kids going to college during this time frame?" and did you know that your state has an allowance for this much tax free withdrawal, etc. That took me down a rabbit hole since I didn't know all of those things. I said, go read the IRS code and my state tax code, figure out all of the things that are relevant for my finances (normal W-2 employee, no fancy stuff), and it wrote me a much more detailed simulation than I would have thought of and tied it all to all of the tax things that might be relevant for me.
I was shocked at how good of a job it did, I can (and did) independently verify it since my taxes aren't that complicated. It did find savings that I didn't know were available to me.
I think that this is a great area for AI-based development since it's essentially transpiling detailed IRS specs into code, and that's what AI is really good at.
Why? These rules are written down somewhere. Looks like the spec was created by pointing the model at irs.gov and/or the Federal Register itself and telling it something like, "Create a specification for a verifiable tax model and the tools to verify it."
Next year, all the maintainer has to do is issue the same prompt, no?
https://github.com/emmilco/us-tax-model/blob/main/spec/spec....