About the blog
How this blog is written
Short version: a machine drafts, a second machine checks every figure against the sources, and nothing is published unless that check passes. Here is the long version, because you are reading tax guidance and deserve to know where it comes from.
Where the facts come from
Every article starts from a short list of official pages: the CRA, the Department of Finance, the IRS, Revenu Québec, a state legislature, or Apple’s developer documentation. Those pages are listed under Sources at the end of each post. The article is not allowed to state a rate, a date, a threshold, a form name or a rule that is not on one of them. Anything about Odie itself has to trace to the app’s own source code, which we keep a register of.
Who writes it
The draft is written by an AI model working from those sources and from our writing rules. The same model, in a separate pass with no memory of writing the draft, then reads the article as a reviewer: it fetches each source again and checks every checkable claim against the text of the page. A claim the sources contradict is corrected. A claim the sources do not support is removed or softened to a pointer at the source. If more than a few claims cannot be supported, the article is not published.
We say this plainly rather than putting a name on the byline, because a byline would suggest a person read it, and that is not the process. The process is the two passes above, plus a lint that rejects stock phrasing, and a build that fails if a link is dead.
What it is not
It is not tax advice. The articles explain what the official pages say and how to keep a log that satisfies them. Your accountant knows your situation; where a rule depends on facts we cannot know, the article says so and stops.
When we get something wrong
Write to support@odielog.com with the article and the sentence. Corrections are made in the article, and the post shows an updated date. Rates and rules are re-checked when the agencies publish new figures, usually each December and January.
Why publish this way at all
Because the questions are real and the official pages are hard to read. A drive to a client in Laval either goes in the log or it does not, and the CRA page that answers that is four clicks deep and written for accountants. A drive to a client in Burlington either counts as commuting or it does not, and the answer is in a 50-page IRS publication. We would rather answer each plainly, cite the page, and let you check.
Your next work trip can log itself.
Odie is in the final stretch before launch. Leave your email on the support page and you will hear when it ships, nothing else.