I wanted to organise our household spending records so I could check later what we had spent and how much. Keeping digital copies of the paper receipts was part of that plan.
Scan the receipts and turn them into PDFs.
So far, so good. Thinking about what came next brought me to a halt.
Open a PDF. Look at its contents. Type a new filename according to the naming rules.
Then repeat that for every receipt?
I explained the problem to Kimiko-chan—the name I gave ChatGPT.
We were discussing how to organise receipts using a scanner that was due to arrive. I wanted to work out the process and specifications before it got here.
Having a naming convention and being willing to keep naming files that way were two different things.
Look inside the file. Work out its name. Type it without making a mistake.
Imagining that process, I ended my explanation with:
“I don’t want to do that. (Laughs.)”
Kimiko-chan revised the proposed workflow in response.
Put the scans in an unprocessed folder first. From there, get help reading the contents and naming the files. Set aside anything unclear for checking.
That was the direction of the revised proposal.
My concern was about more than making filenames look neat and consistent.
What would I have to do every time?
Turning paper into PDFs would still leave work to do if I then had to open each one and type its name.
As we talked, one requirement became clearer.
I did not want to keep looking at the same receipt just to give its file a name.
This was not yet a report on using the proposed process. It was a request to make the work something I could keep doing.
While waiting for the scanner, I had identified one specific task I did not want to take on.
The words that help clarify a specification are not always grand or technical.
This time, the important ones were: “I don’t want to do that. (Laughs.)”