Thoughts

Vibe Coding My Finances

Automating YNAB with Zapier, Telegram, and a Bit of Cyberpunk Magic

🧠 Manual Finance Feels Like 1980s Data Entry

I use YNAB (You Need a Budget) religiously to track every peso. It’s a powerful system for mindful spending… until reality kicks in.

If you’re using Bancolombia, you know the drill:

  • You get an email and an SMS every time you spend.
  • Each transaction needs to be entered manually into YNAB — amount, merchant, category, memo, marked cleared.
  • Each entry takes maybe 30 seconds if you’re fast.

Now, imagine 20+ transactions per day.

That’s 10 minutes daily, or about 5 hours every month spent copy-pasting numbers into a budgeting app.

Five hours of your life each month — gone to typing. Not fun, not cyberpunk.

⚙️ The Idea — Let the Machines Do It

I wanted something that:

  1. Reads Bancolombia’s transaction emails.
  2. Extracts the value and merchant info automatically.
  3. Sends me a Telegram notification where I can just pick a YNAB category.
  4. Posts the transaction directly to YNAB via its API.
  5. Marks it cleared. Instantly. No friction. No typing.

And I wanted to build it with zero infrastructure — no servers, no frameworks, no cron jobs. Just pure vibe coding using Zapier + Telegram bot + YNAB API + a bit of JavaScript inside Zapier Code steps.

🕹️ The Stack

  • Zapier – orchestration brain, reading emails, storing payloads, and triggering flows.
  • Telegram Bot – human interface for category selection.
  • YNAB API – to create transactions and cover categories automatically.
  • JavaScript (inside Zapier Code by Zapier) – for data parsing and custom logic.
  • ChatGPT (a.k.a. Vibe Coding Copilot) – for generating and refactoring the code directly inside Zapier.

⚙️ The Architecture

  • Zap 1 – Bancolombia Transaction Parser
    • Trigger: new Bancolombia email.
    • Code step: parses text (e.g., “Transferiste $120,000.00 a Rappi…”).
    • Fetches all visible YNAB categories via API.
    • Sends a message to Telegram with transaction summary and category buttons.
    • Stores the transaction temporarily in Zapier Storage.
  • Zap 2 – Category Tap → YNAB Entry
    • Trigger: Telegram button press (callback_query).
    • Fetches stored transaction data.
    • Sends it to YNAB as a new cleared transaction with the chosen category.
    • Auto-covers category from Ready-To-Assign (so it stays green).
    • Sends a Telegram confirmation: ✅ Amount 120,000 COP added to Groceries.
    • Cleans up the stored payload.

🔮 The Flow

  1. You buy something → Bancolombia emails you.
  2. Zap 1 grabs it instantly, parses merchant, amount, time.
  3. You get a slick Telegram message like:
Transferiste $120,000.00 en RAPPI COLOMBIA*DL
[🍔 Food] [🚕 Transport] [🎮 Fun] [💡 Utilities]
  1. Tap one category → that triggers Zap 2.
  2. YNAB gets the transaction + clears it + covers from Ready to Assign.
  3. You get a confirmation: ✅ 120,000 COP added to Groceries.

No browser. No manual entry. No spreadsheets. Just automation humming in the background like neon circuits in a rainy alley.

🧬 Why This Feels Cyberpunk

Because it’s not about “coding” in the old sense — it’s vibe coding:

  • You’re not deploying servers, you’re wiring systems together.
  • You’re mixing AI-assisted snippets, APIs, and low-code glue.
  • You’re turning boring routines into automated rituals.

I didn’t open IDE, Google, or API docs.

I opened Zapier, typed some JS, and let ChatGPT guide the logic.

No infrastructure. No deployments. No burnout.

Just results.

🧠 Lessons from the Future

  • You can automate anything if you break it into signals (emails, messages, API calls).
  • Modern tools are the new cyberpunk gear — Zapier, Telegram, AI.
  • 90% of code is plumbing; vibe coding makes you skip that part.
  • The best code is the code that deletes work from your life.

🌐 Conclusion

This project reminded me that we live in the future already — you don’t need a dev team to build automation.

With ChatGPT, Zapier, and a few well-aimed APIs, you can build a system that does in seconds what used to take hours every week.

Vibe coding is the new hacking.

You just need imagination, curiosity, and a bit of caffeine glow from your monitor.

“The machines don’t steal our jobs. They free us from the boring parts.”

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