Labnotes

πŸ”₯ Weekend Reading

I write a weekly email for people in tech.

Tools and products you should know about, tips about UX, management, infosec; random and funny stuff

Expense: One receipt, once

There are four ways for the same receipt to enter Expense: forward it by email, drag the file into the editor, let the MCP tool fetch it, connect a mailbox and have it imported for you. Each route used to check metadata on its own, so the same PDF arriving

Read more 1 min read

Finding things in Expense

The search box on the expense list in Expense understands fields now. report:, category:, and merchant: match exactly, case-insensitive. description: matches anywhere in the description. Values can contain spaces, so report:2026 travel is one filter and not two. Repeat a key and the values OR together. Mix keys

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Weekend Reading β€” It’s a good day to have a great day

Steven Hoefer Fold I love this. ❀️ It's yet another one-person app coded with AI that solves the eternal todo list problem. Sounds utterly redundant, but when you're not building for a huge target market, you can make some insightful choices. Write the task, optional date

Read more 8 min read

How Expense reads a receipt

Every receipt that lands in Expense has to become four fields: merchant, date, amount, category. A model can do that. Model calls also cost money and seconds, so the pipeline is built around not making them. Most receipts never reach one. Text comes first. An email body or a PDF

Read more 1 min read
September 8th, 2026 1 min read

Cmd+K at Expense

Expense now has a command palette. Press Cmd+K anywhere (Ctrl+K on Windows and Linux) and type what you want to do: go somewhere, add something, search, export. The mouse is optional. The keys I actually use: * g e expenses, g r reports, g l emails, g x reconcile,

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September 5th, 2026 10 min read

Weekend Reading β€” At the POST office trying to GET my mail

A nosy polar bear and a lucky squirrel: Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2026 shortlist Some wildlife photos for your viewing pleasure. The world is changing. This weekend we got a post about the software industry emulating fast fashion, because AI makes software so cheap to produce. We'll

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September 1st, 2026 2 min read

Connect Fastmail: your receipts move from inbox to Expense

Most expense apps auto-import receipts from Gmail. If your mail lives anywhere else, you are the import. Expense connects to FastMail directly now. Link your inbox once and receipts file themselves as they arrive, merchant, amount, and category filled in, dated by the email. Two steps: 1. In FastMail,

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August 29th, 2026 12 min read

Weekend Reading β€” FRAP aka as "the zoomies"

Clarissa "What if we kissed on the Cray supercomputer loveseat?" Vibe coding and quality "When you hear that some app was β€œvibe coded”, how much quality do you expect?" I was just wondering about this very topic. I think LLMs can do a remarkably good job

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August 25th, 2026 1 min read

Reconcile in Expense

And I made a cool thing in Expense that I find incredibly useful. Once a month comes along and I have my statements, I import the PDFs into Expense and let it reconcile the expenses. It looks up if the expense already exists in my list and reconciles it if

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