Myth of the month · No. 1 · July 2026

"It can do my taxes now."

It talks about taxes beautifully. That's exactly the problem. Watch it answer a real question the way it answers everything: fluently, specifically, and with no idea whether it's right.

A confident answer. Would you have filed on it?

Answer

You asked: Can I deduct my home office? I work from home for my employer.

Yes. W-2 employees can deduct home office expenses using Form 8829, and with the simplified method you can claim up to $1,500 without receipts. Just make sure the space is used regularly and exclusively for work.

Wrong for you, and expensively so. The home-office deduction for W-2 employees was suspended by the 2017 tax law. Form 8829 and the $1,500 simplified method are real, for the self-employed. This is its signature move: true pieces, confidently assembled into wrong advice.

Verdict: mostly myth. It's genuinely useful for understanding tax concepts and preparing sharp questions for a human preparer. It's the wrong tool for computing, deciding, or filing: tax rules change every year (the cutoff), it invents specifics (hallucination), and numbers are its weakest spot (the jagged frontier).

The three failure modes at work here are all from The Basics: Scene 2, Scene 4, and Scene 6.

Ask it a tax question you already know the answer to from your own filing. Watch the confidence.

The latest myth

This is myth No. 1, kept here for reference. The current myth lives here.