Finance Grind • March 10, 2026 • By Dekena Wade

What Jason Yen's Tax Tool Reveals About the Future of Finance Work

Jason Yen built a tax structure diagram tool in 2 hours using ChatGPT Codex with zero coding experience. His story reveals something bigger about how AI is reshaping professional hierarchies and what it means for firms like EY.

I saw a post from Jason Yen at OpenAI that stopped me in my tracks.

He described building a tax structure diagram tool in 2 hours using ChatGPT Codex. Zero coding experience. Just a clear description of what he needed, and the AI generated a working application.

What struck me wasn't the speed or the lack of coding knowledge.

It was what his story reveals about how professional work is fundamentally changing.

The Old Model: Delegate and Wait

At EY, I saw this dynamic play out constantly.

When a senior person needed a tax structure diagram, they'd hand it off to a junior analyst. The junior would spend an hour or two building it in PowerPoint or Visio. The senior would review, request changes, and wait for the next iteration.

It was efficient at scale. You hire smart people, teach them the process, and have them execute at volume.

But there's a hidden cost: iteration speed.

If you wanted to change how the diagram worked, you couldn't just tweak it yourself. You had to explain the change to someone else, wait for them to implement it, and review the result. That cycle could take hours or days.

Jason's story is different.

The New Model: Build and Iterate Immediately

Jason didn't delegate. He built.

Two hours later, he had a working tool. And here's the key part: if he doesn't like something, he can change it himself immediately, with no waiting and no communication overhead.

That's not just faster. That's a fundamentally different way of working.

At EY, I worked on complex tax strategies that required multiple rounds of refinement. Each round meant explaining changes, waiting for updates, reviewing results. The work got done, but the cycle was slow.

With AI tools, the bottleneck shifts.

It's no longer execution. It's thinking.

What This Means for the Hierarchy

The traditional model of professional services assumes a clear division: senior people think, junior people execute.

Knowledge flows down. Work flows up.

But when senior people can execute their own ideas in real time, that hierarchy flattens.

Jason's post includes a disclaimer: his tool won't replace PowerPoint or Visio. It's not as polished. It doesn't have all the features of enterprise software. But that's exactly the point.

It does exactly what he needs, exactly when he needs it, and he can change it whenever he wants. That's a different value proposition than professional tools offer.

And it changes what junior analysts are for.

The Uncomfortable Question for Firms Like EY

If senior professionals can build their own tools using AI, what happens to the junior analyst role?

The answer isn't that junior staff disappear. It's that their work shifts.

They might spend less time on diagram-building and more time on higher-level analysis, client interaction, or strategic thinking. Or they might focus on different types of work altogether.

But here's what's uncomfortable: the firms that don't adapt will find themselves slower and more expensive than the ones that do.

The firms that empower their senior people with AI tools and reorganize workflows around that capability will see productivity gains.

The firms that try to protect the old model, where junior staff do routine work, might find themselves at a disadvantage.

The Deeper Shift

Jason's story is small, but it signals something much larger.

For decades, professional services operated on a model of leverage: senior people manage relationships and strategy, junior people execute. It's scalable. It's profitable. It works.

But AI tools are changing the economics of execution.

When execution becomes cheap and fast, the value of professional work shifts toward thinking, judgment, and client relationships.

That's not bad for junior staff. In fact, it might be better. Junior analysts who spend their time thinking critically about tax strategy, not building diagrams, are more engaged and more valuable.

But it requires firms to reorganize how they work.

What I Learned at EY

My time at EY taught me how large financial services firms operate. The systems are sophisticated. The processes are refined. The talent is exceptional.

But they're also built on assumptions about how work gets done.

Jason's post challenges one of those assumptions: that building tools requires coding expertise, or that building tools is junior work.

It's neither.

It's just work that needed to get done, and now it can be done faster and better by the person who understands the problem.

The Real Question

The question isn't whether AI will replace professional tools or junior staff.

The question is: how fast will firms like EY adapt their workflows to take advantage of what AI can do?

The firms that move quickly will see their senior people become more productive, more autonomous, and more creative.

The firms that move slowly will watch their competitors pull ahead.

Jason's tax diagram tool is small. But it's a signal of a much bigger shift happening in how professional work gets organized.

And for anyone in finance—especially those who spent time at firms like EY—that shift is worth paying very close attention to.