Man with no coding or tax experience vibe codes a tax prep app in weeks

A journalist with no coding experience at all has created his own tax filing app, but is looking for experts to stress-test it since all the code was written by artificial intelligence. 

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Ryan Lizza, in an article posted on Telos News, explained the various ways he was unhappy with Intuit Turbotax which led him to try creating his own tax preparation software through what’s known as “vibe coding,” or creating the software with AI through natural language prompts. He named the result Telos Tax, and described it as “TurboTax on steroids.” It is meant to prepare both federal and state returns for free. 

“The app guides you through your taxes step by step in an interview mode. If you’re a tax pro, you can enter your info directly on any of dozens of IRS tax forms. It can import your tax documents. It can organize your spending transactions by tax category. It has a dashboard where you can adjust sliders for over 20 different tax variables. It gives you a FICO-like score to assess your likelihood of being audited. The app produces pretty donut and bar charts summarizing your finances and flow visualizations that trace the trajectory of every dollar of your income, deductions, credits, and the taxes you pay,” he wrote. 

The entire tax engine is public: Anyone can read the code, verify the math, and contribute, and every calculation traces to an IRS statute or regulation. The tax return itself exists only in the user’s browser, encrypted with AES-256-GCM, versus working through accounts, cloud storage or data collection. Once the app is loaded it does not even need an Internet connection.

If someone decides to enable AI features, the app also has a built-in privacy audit log that shows them exactly what was sent to the AI provider, what personally identifying information was blocked, and what came back. Finally, by default the application operates fully online with zero data leaving the device. BYOK Mode adds AI features using the user’s own Anthropic API key, with personal information automatically stripped from every message.

Lizza emphasized that he had no special skills, including knowledge of U.S. tax law. Yet, he was able to use Anthropic’s Claude to generate 234,000 lines of code that form an application that he said can produce a federal tax return for any American — even for complex needs like farm income, rental properties, asset depreciation schedules, AMT adjustments, crypto sales, a Roth conversion, net operating loss carryforward and more. 

This was all done in just a few weeks. He said Claude estimates that, without AI, a similar project would have taken from two to three years. 

Lizza is aware of his total lack of experience in both tax preparation and coding, and so while the application appears slick, he voiced concern that Claude built what he called a “Potemkin” app. And so, in order to see whether it actually works, he released the app to the public as a free open-source project so tax professionals and actual human coders can vet it. The entire thing is available on GitHub.

He warned that people should treat this as an experimental prototype and not actually use this to file their taxes: “It’s possible Claude got everything wrong.”

But if, after stress tests, it turns out it actually works, it will show that it is possible for someone with no programming experience or specialized tax knowledge to create in weeks the same kind of product that, before, took hundreds of engineers at a Fortune 500 company several years to produce. 

What impact such a development might have on not only the accounting software market, but all commercial software in general, remains to be seen.