Pflegegeld-Prüfer: Turkish and a deadline calculator, no AI
One week after HACK_002: a deadline bug fixed. New are a deadline calculator without AI and Turkish.
TL;DR
Pflegegeld-Prüfer, my checker for Austrian care allowance decisions, has been live since 27 September at www.pflegegeld-pruefer.at, free and with no ads. Then an audit found a real bug in the deadline calculation. It's fixed, and there's now a deadline calculator without AI. English has been public since 1 October, Turkish follows today. How the hackathon went is in the recap.
The yellow slip
On Thursday I had the whole live site audited again, all text checked against law and code. The most important finding had nothing to do with AI.
In Austria you cannot lodge an objection to a care allowance decision. The only route is a court action at the Labour and Social Court, within three months of delivery. That deadline cannot be extended.
Often the post office holds the letter and leaves a yellow slip. The decision then counts as delivered on the first day of the collection period, not the day you collect it.
The form only asked "delivered on". If you entered the day you collected the letter, the deadline it showed ended too late. The calendar reminder could also come after the real deadline. At worst, that could cost you the right to go to court.
Now it asks first: delivered, or held at the post office? If held, you enter the first day of the collection period. With only the date on the decision, it never says "expired", only "may still be running".
A deadline calculator without AI
The deadline calculator came out of the same audit. You enter only the date, and a fixed program works out when the deadline ends, taking weekends and public holidays into account.
It runs in your browser with no server call and no model, so your date stays with you. It also works when the AI service is down.
When the checker suggests advice, the result now lists three places with contact details. For members, the Chamber of Labour and the disability association KOBV. For everyone with Pflegegeld, a free home visit from the Ministry of Social Affairs.
English is live, Turkish follows today
Romanian, Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian, Polish and Hungarian are in the works. For each language, a dedicated AI agent acts as language expert and checks every text against the German original. Only when it signs off do I switch the language on.
For Turkish, it said no at first. On the method page, "untouched cases" had become something like "never used". Wrong: the cases ran in model comparisons before the build. And the sentence telling you which day to enter for a held letter was missing. After 113 corrections it signed off.
Tell your story in German, though: it is the only language the checker has been measured in.
What stays the same
You tell your care day, the model maps your sentences to rules and quotes them, the code computes. You decide.
The most reliable figure, from 15 court cases I did not touch after the build, has not changed. In a single run with Claude Opus 5.5 at the hackathon, the checker got 5 right, most of the others too low. Taking the level from the decision would have been right more often. So it does not reliably tell whether a decision is correct. Gemini 3.8 Flash, the model on the site, has not been measured on them yet.
For you that means: if the checker shows more than your decision, take a closer look and get advice. If it does not show more, that does not mean your decision is right. Every measurement, including the bad ones, is on the method page.
The checker helps you prepare for a meeting with an adviser. It is not legal advice.
If you know someone in Austria with a Pflegegeld decision, pass the link on: www.pflegegeld-pruefer.at. And if you read Turkish and something on the site sounds off, write to me.