Claude (web) saved me a ton of money with a new hobby. I was curious about astrophotography and had a budget to fill in any missing pieces from my existing photography kit. The conclusion was basically: "get a $20 intervalometer and a wall-wart battery[1]. The lenses you've got are fine, the tripod you've got is fine, and hey good news, Jupyter and Venus are near conjunction so if you can find somewhere dark where you can shoot to the west, you can get a pretty cool timelapse this weekend"
Later on also provided some rough guidelines for the partial lunar eclipse that resulted in some pretty amazing photos.
Since then I have been doing a bit of research on getting a real mount, so that initial budget will probably get used, but it'll be a) for kit that I genuinely don't have yet and b) spent after I've already confirmed that I thoroughly enjoy going out and photographing the stars for hours and then stitching all those photos into timelapses or other neat stacks.
[1] I'm not sure what the right name is for this. One end is battery-shaped but has a wire that plugs into a wall-wart instead of having to switch batteries. I had an existing 500-Wh 120V battery bank thing and it was more than enough to run the camera for 6 hours.