I usually avoid shallow comments but I feel like this time it has to be said as a conversation starter: That's a lot of eggs!

Also ignoring the benefits of subscriptions, an estimate in the magnitude of thousands of dollars for extracting egg prices still makes me feel like we aren't "there" yet. This should have been a problem with a much more efficient solution given the advancements in the AI, data analysis and OCR space. I am sort of disillusioned.

> Estimated token cost $1,591 > Confirmed egg receipts 589 > Total egg spend captured $1,972 > Total eggs 8,604

...

> I can’t wait to see what 30 years of eggs looks like.

At $2.70 per receipt, i'd be in no hurry to find out!

Inflation adjusted dsta just comes to tell us that either eggs have been outdoing the CPI for 25 years or that actual CPI is way higher than what the BLS calculates.

Absolutely loved the article, the process, and the results. Hated the price.

You could pay a human to read receipts, 1 every 30 seconds (that’s slow!), $15/hr (twice the US federal minimum wage!), plus tax and overhead ($15x1.35) comes out to $20.25/hr over 5 hours. $101 all in.

Sure, sure, a human solution doesn’t scale. But this sort of project makes me feel like we haven’t hit the industrialization moment that i thought we had quite yet.

I haven't tried it with receipts, but I've gotten excellent OCR results with Gemini 3.0 and now 3.1 on some challenging texts: handwritten letters I couldn't fully decipher myself, vertically printed Japanese texts with tiny furigana readings next to the kanji, a 19th century book in English with extensive use of italics and small caps. Gemini is good at extracting text and formatting from complex layouts, and it might work with egg receipts, too.

> Estimated token cost $1,591

I can assume this person does in fact NOT need to worry about the price of eggs ?

Great article through and through. The total number of places you've bought eggs at made me feel a tad depressed though: 4 places where you lived at or spent a longer time, 5 you traveled to *.

I tend to grow bored of a location after a year or two, though I'm certainly in the minority.

* Of course you didn't buy eggs every time you traveled somewhere, so probably not the entire truth.