I’m Jackie. Close to Code is where I explore what AI costs, where it genuinely helps, and what changes when it becomes part of real finance work.
Explore an interactive finance dashboard with KPI drill-downs, actual-versus-budget analysis, billing-to-ledger reconciliation, scenario modeling, auditable exports, and the SQL behind every report.
Launch the guided simulationA low token price can look like savings until retries, rework, review time, integrations, and failure handling enter the picture. The more useful question is: What does the entire workflow cost?
The interesting number is not always the rate on the invoice. It is what the whole system asks people, processes, and other tools to do around it.
Read the field noteClose to Code follows the questions that appear after AI becomes part of real work: what are we paying for, where does it help, what new work does it create, and who owns the decision?
Model costs are only one part of the bill. I’m looking at APIs, subscriptions, review time, rework, and where the cost moves.
Read: The invoice is not the cost modelAccounting workflows, reconciliation, payments, expenses, exceptions, and the work technology moves rather than removes.
Read: Exceptions are the workflowRetries, inconsistent outputs, ownership, failure handling, human review, and the details that determine whether an idea holds up.
Read: Human in the loop is not a strategyDecision rights, incentives, accountability, job design, institutional knowledge, vendor dependence, and hidden assumptions.
Read: Anomaly detection is not an explanationI want to understand what an AI system costs in context, what work it changes, and whether the result remains understandable to the people responsible for it.
Include review time, integrations, retries, rework, and downstream effort.
When technology saves time in one place, look for where the work moved and who inherited it.
Make it clear who can recommend, approve, change, and stop the process.
I work in accounting and finance operations, and I can get absorbed in understanding why a process keeps breaking or why a tool that was supposed to make life easier created three new problems.
Close to Code is where I share what I’m building, testing, and learning along the way.
I’m preparing an occasional Close to Code newsletter about AI costs, finance workflows, system behavior, and the questions that appear once technology meets real work.
Read the field notes