21 pointsby dimitri-vs2 hours ago3 comments
  • uniq716 minutes ago
    I wonder what kind of life the author has in order to start 9 disputes worth $12k in just 7 months.

    The only dispute I had in the last year is some $3 tweezers I ordered on Amazon that never shipped, and Amazon automatically reimbursed the money.

    • brandonpaiz3 minutes ago
      I mean…did you read it? Half was pre-exiting debt owed to the IRS from before the seven month period, auto repair, and medical bills for their wife are the big ones, all of which are within normal for an average Joe
    • IceDane9 minutes ago
      I've not had disputes worth that much in nearly 40 years on this earth. Makes me wonder whether this is just some exaggerated nonsense. The article is certainly written by an LLM.
  • suburban_strike18 minutes ago
    > Author here. For seven months I've been handing every consumer dispute to a Claude agent instead of eating the cost like I normally would. It builds the case file, pulls the warranty or policy text and the terms of service, works out who actually regulates the company, and plans a "campaign" with fallbacks. Ten unrelated fights (IRS penalties, a car warranty, two insurance denials, a robot mop, grocery stuff), yielded just over $12k back! The biggest single one was an IRS first-time penalty abatement I'd never heard of, $6.8k, eight years into an installment plan.

    > To be honest, the agent's first-pass advice is usually bad ("file an FTC complaint"); what works is multi-prong approach until something moves. For the robo-mop it ended up all the way at their own arbitration clause, whose consumer fee rules cost them several times the refund. For the pet insurer it was the state regulator plus two exec emails, and they relented in hours after two months of stonewalling.

    > Companies rely on a drop-off funnel, and an agent with infinite patience breaks it - thats the story.

    It's flagged and dead but good advice. I've used it a lot for legal disputes (basic contracts).

    It helps to make your argument, then have AI steelman a rebuttal, then modify your argument to smash their steelman. Then your initial outreach is your stage 2 argument that bypasses all plausible initial denials.

    • mikestew9 minutes ago
      It's flagged and dead but good advice.

      Flagged, dead, moderator dang weighed in, and you felt the need to repost it verbatim?

  • dimitri-vsan hour ago
    [flagged]
    • dang24 minutes ago
      Can you please not post AI-generated or AI-edited comments to HN? It's not allowed here - see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#generated and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47340079.

      Of course, it's impossible to know for sure what was LLM processed or not, but some of your posts (like this one) have been getting classified that way.

      • dimitri-vs8 minutes ago
        Got it. For transparency, all of my writing is my own but I do use LLM editing to improve the clarity of it and read every output carefully (and fully) before publishing.

        On my own it often takes me 5-10 minutes just to figure out how to phrase something simple clearly. Like for example I don't how how to say that the amount of my own words I put into the LLM exceed (sometimes double or triple) the output that I end up posting online.

      • k33n10 minutes ago
        This website is a total garbage heap of haughty nobodies putting the brakes on actual conversation to make sure people are “following the rules” — as they break them with impunity.

        Getting the OP’s comment flagged on some personal hunch is such a joke. For some reason this hive of nobodies is allowed to run rampant here, with no moderation on their own off topic comments and weird passive-aggressive conversation-ruining behavior.