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The 3,361% APR

I pasted a real statement into the import screen and got back an account with a 3,361% APR and a balance of $138.51 on a much larger loan.

Originally published at getpaydown.com ↗

  • paydown

I pasted a real statement into the import screen and got back an account with a 3,361% APR and a balance of $138.51 on a much larger loan. Garbage in every field.

I sent Claude screenshots of exactly what I pasted and exactly what came out, and the eval harness went to work reproducing it. Three separate bugs:

  • APR ×100. The model returned 33.61% as "3361". The fix is deterministic: any parsed rate over 100 gets normalized down, and the prompt now pins rates to a sane range. Never trust a language model with a decimal point.
  • The balance trap. Statements are full of numbers that look like balances. The extraction now follows a formula rule for which one is real — and the app computes the balance from the installment terms rather than trusting what was scraped.
  • Two-digit years. "6/11/26" parsed as 2023. A date-format rule fixed it.

For data already imported wrong, Claude added one-time repair migrations that detect impossible values and fix them in place. All of it shipped as build 3, same day.