With many thanks to Anthropic for supporting the Ledger project

[John Wiegley]

As some of you who watch the GitHub activity may have noticed, I've been using AI a lot recently to help me increase the amount of testing coverage, address bugs, clean up some of the documentation and comments, add many more validation steps into our CI, and even modernize the codebase by updating it to C++17 standards. And then there's the rledger port to Rust as well that's been underway…

Yesterday, Anthropic gifted six months of usage of their Opus model to help further this development. With many thanks to them, my hope is that, using gifts like these, we will be able to get down to zero open bugs, 100% code coverage, and at least 10% further improvement in overall performance of common operations. And hopefully it won't even take six months to get there!

I also have a few other improvements planned, like rewriting the report query parser to use a real parser instead of the token-based hack that it uses now, as well as a better approach to external scripting that may allow for languages other than Python (while also improving the Python support that we have currently).

Stay tuned!

  John

[mb...@mbork.pl]

While I'm rather an LLM skeptic (even if I use Claude Code myself), this
is good news. May I humbly ask whether there's a chance of improving
the documentation, too? (Emacs Ledger mode, while great, could also use
some minor improvements.)

Since the common answer to such questions is "this is a FOSS project,
PRs are welcome", I think I can safely say that I can try and work on
a few aspects - either via submitting patches (especially for the docs)
or reporting bugs/feature requests.

Thanks for your work on Ledger, John! (BTW, I've been using it for well
over a decade now, being a former GNUCash user.)

Best,

--
Marcin Borkowski
https://mbork.pl

[Igbanam Ogbuluijah]

This is exciting news, John! 

Could Ruby be considered as one of those scripting languages? I will do my best to help with this one. Also, since you're already thinking about Reports — if it's not too much trouble — could you consider tabular views for these reports?

Thanks for the awesome work here as always. 

Igbanam

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[John Wiegley]

>>>>> "m" == mbork <mb...@mbork.pl> writes:

> While I'm rather an LLM skeptic (even if I use Claude Code myself), this is
> good news. May I humbly ask whether there's a chance of improving the
> documentation, too? (Emacs Ledger mode, while great, could also use some
> minor improvements.)

Hi Marcin!

Yes, I’m in the middle of a fairly large documentation revision -- both in the
code and the manual. The remaining stages of this plan are in the file:

https://github.com/ledger/ledger/blob/main/DOC-WORK-PLAN.md

I hadn’t considered updating the Emacs mode until you mentioned it, but that’s
a worthwhile next project after this.

John

[John Wiegley]

>>>>> "IO" == Igbanam Ogbuluijah <xigb...@gmail.com> writes:

> This is exciting news, John!
>
> Could Ruby be considered as one of those scripting languages? I will do my
> best to help with this one. Also, since you're already thinking about
> Reports — if it's not too much trouble — could you consider tabular views
> for these reports?

Alexis Hildebrandt has been talking about using SWIG so that almost any other
scripting language could be used. This would entirely remove all Python bits
from within Ledger, changing it to a calculational “core” library that
provides exports any other scripting languages can link into. It will depends
on all of the core types being able to map into that language (such as
amounts, balances, etc), but I intend to explore this further once my Claude
allocation resets tonight. Turns out that the Max 20x plan is nowhere near
enough for all the work I want to get done in this project!

> Thanks for the awesome work here as always.

Thank you all!

John

[John Wiegley]

>>>>> "IO" == Igbanam Ogbuluijah <xigb...@gmail.com> writes:

> Also, since you're already thinking about Reports — if it's not too much
> trouble — could you consider tabular views for these reports?

On the reporting question, it may be better for Ledger to provide better data
exporting so that other languages can turn that data into fancy reports of
various kinds. The core C++ engine already does quite a lot, and reports are a
much more highly personal thing that should be easier for the user to
customize and modify than what the current reporting schemes in Ledger allow
for (or that I could ever be able to fully predict).

John

[mb...@mbork.pl]

On 2026-03-05, at 06:22, "John Wiegley" <jwie...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi Marcin!
>
> Yes, I’m in the middle of a fairly large documentation revision -- both in the
> code and the manual. The remaining stages of this plan are in the file:
>
> https://github.com/ledger/ledger/blob/main/DOC-WORK-PLAN.md

I'm getting 404.

> I hadn’t considered updating the Emacs mode until you mentioned it, but that’s
> a worthwhile next project after this.

Thanks! I'll try to either submit a PR or at least report one annoying
bug I've noticed.

[John Wiegley]

>>>>> mbork <mb...@mbork.pl> writes:

>> https://github.com/ledger/ledger/blob/main/DOC-WORK-PLAN.md

> I'm getting 404.

I moved quickly enough that the result of all the work is now in main and has
been completed. At least for this first phase.

>> I hadn’t considered updating the Emacs mode until you mentioned it, but
>> that’s a worthwhile next project after this.

> Thanks! I'll try to either submit a PR or at least report one annoying bug
> I've noticed.

Thank you!

John