mbm

That's actually one of the best things about the current moment -- it's getting easier and easier to do things yourself, and there's less and less reason to use someone else's tool. It's sort of raising the bar for all the apps out there.

Give GPT in Codex a try! I agree, Claude still seems quite prone to hallucinations, especially with incomplete or limited datasets.

This. It's really cool to weave other data sources into your data.

I recently needed to set up some calendar events on certain dividend days, but of course, didn't know what those dividend dates actually were. So we used the MCP connector to retrieve our current Vanguard holdings, had GPT-Pro do web research to pull all the dates, and then created calendar events from that. Worked well.

Routines are so fun to work with. It's almost too easy to spin a new one up. A little worried about when I get past the 15 routines limit, though. Then it goes into "extra usage" land.

Actually, it's deterministic -- our product doesn't move money, so when the user gives us access through Plaid, we're only getting read-level permissions. We actually don't even get full account numbers.

A company working with Plaid has to request separate product "scopes" through Plaid in order to be able to move money.

Thanks for sharing your story!

Hear you 100%. It felt very uncomfortable for me the first time I used it, as well.

The problem is that there sort of isn't a better way right now in the US, and for now, Plaid or a Plaid-like competitor is the safest way. Eventually, it would be awesome if there were clean, open APIs, and standards around this, but for now, it's the best we have.

The alternative of course for the DIY-er is some sort of browser automation, which honestly, is what I tried first. I really wanted it to work, but it didn't - which led us to Plaid.

It's read only, we can't move money.

And I totally hear you -- we had this happen in our family as well, and it was really sad. Security is a massive priority for us, but it's always going to be a cost-benefit analysis for each person.

Happy to share more about our infra in a follow-up post.

Indeed. Always have to be thinking about prompt injection when it comes to these tools.

Awesome feedback. Agree 100% with this. I guess a couple comments:

- We have a built-in CSV export tool in beta right now for cash transactions, and plan to add this for other datasets as well. You should be able to download your data when you want it. It's yours.

- Yes, tracking is great, but it also has a dark side. My sort of vision, at least for what I want, is less of a gamified finance tracker and more of an ambient, always-on agent that's watching for me. It knows my preferences, it knows what I care about, and it tells me when it finds something.

- Before we get there though, for now, it's really interesting to sort of tinker and build your own custom finance automations. As a programmer, it just feels liberating to get the data out of some closed banking app and into a space I'm comfortable in.

- Especially from an investing standpoint, it's been neat to pair our MCP with a much smarter model like 5.4 Pro and have it do long-horizon research tasks that require a lot of web research and correlation.

Could you share more about how it works?

Did it find any stragglers?

Hi! Thanks for sharing.

I actually built it for myself initially, and my wife. So I just built what we needed/wanted.

There will be a huge variety of products in this space and ours is just one take on the problem. I love seeing anything that's taking a shot at it.

It must be very very new, since we weren't offered it a couple months ago!

That's so cool! Are you planning to open source any of this? Would love to see how you set everything up, or - maybe most interested in - some of your prompts.

Sounds awesome! Would love to. Just launched our app to Plaid production this week.

Nice! What are your main use-cases?

Hi all, Matt here - founder. Happy to answer any questions. Thanks for stopping by!

Correct, sales encourages you to sign their minimum contract, which basically gets you better support and an account manager. Pay as you go is an option, but Plaid indicated you basically wouldn't have any guaranteed support SLA post-launch if you were on PAYG.

Thanks for sharing! Would be curious to learn more.

It's pretty straightforward! There's a widget in the app that you auth through, and then you give consent for the data pull through Plaid. This authorizes the connection, and then webhooks come in going forward as data changes.

For the non-Plaid assets eg., home, car, etc., we just added custom asset MCP tools so you can manually add those and they're included in your computed net worth.

I think it's rather hard because of their security & contractual requirements -- we had to sign a contract with them, go through security review, and so on.

Yup! Actually starting to experiment with that now.

Just this morning, we stood up a demo email agent (basically, email back and forth with Claude with our MCP server connected, providing the data) and it's strangely comforting to chat with it. There's something about the medium of email and how it just works because that's where you're already used to talking with your financial advisor.

There's a lot of nuance in how it's built though, and everyone has different preferences, so to start with the focus is really on building an agent-friendly MCP.

Works pretty well as a general-purpose computer. The speed is really enjoyable. Could replace some of my Claude Code use actually. For coding, set to xhigh and use it for personal tools or small projects.

Example repo that Codex with spark made in about 15 minutes for me since `claude --resume` has been finicky lately: https://github.com/mzxrai/claude-sessions

What sort of files do you generally symlink in?

This might be strangely effective.

Codex is a bit better bug-wise but less enjoyable to use than CC. The larger context window and superiority of GPT 5.2 to Opus makes it mostly worth it to switch.

Hmm, so even just doing a simple ls -la on the home dir is occasionally taking ~10s. Other times, it's instant (I'm on a stable 1 Gbps connection).

Have been experiencing intermittent connection drops as well.

This is amazing. Great job Fly team!

Location: Austin, TX

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Prefer remote

Technologies: Agnostic. 15 years of backend and full-stack experience, but now focus on the AI integration stack (JavaScript/Python).

Résumé/CV: https://linkedin.com/in/matthewbmay | https://github.com/mzxrai

Email: matt@goodsoftware.dev

--

Hi all, I'm Matt May - a freelance AI consultant with 15 years of software engineering experience. I've worked with Fortune 150 companies, startups, and everything in between, and have done AI research at Stanford & Georgia Tech.

If you're planning or working on an AI implementation, I'd love to chat. My specialities include: AI integration/implementation, complex backend development, APIs, AI strategy, and legacy SaaS replacement.

I've worked remotely for years, but can travel as needed.

Drop me a line. Happy to jump on a video call anytime!