GoKawiil25 Years of Eggs
Published: February 23, 2026
Everyone needs a rewarding hobby. I’ve been scanning all of my receipts since 2001. I never typed in a single price - just kept the images. I figured someday the technology to read them would catch up, and the data would be interesting.
This year I tested it. Two AI coding agents, 11,345 receipts. I started with eggs. If you can track one item across 25 years of garbled thermal prints, OCR failures, and folder typos, you can track anything.
14 days. 1.6 billion tokens. 589 egg receipts found. Here’s what the data says.
Here’s what I typed on Day 1:
Ok so let’s make a project plan. In the ~/Records/ we have a ton of receipts. Many are pdf/image/etc. I want to go through and extract the actual content of the receipts to find how much we spend on eggs. Receipts are notoriously terrible to OCR, so we might need to do something more advanced.
Codex explored my file system, found two existing SQLite databases I’d forgotten about, discovered 11,345 receipts across PDFs, emails, and images, and came back with a project plan. I said “write this out to a plan.md please.” It did. We were building within the hour.
The whole thing took 14 days. Maybe 15 hours of me actually at the keyboard - short bursts of direction-giving separated by long stretches of the agents just running. Codex ran 15 interactive sessions. Claude handled 10.
Shades of White
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