Show HN: Spltty – a Markdown-based personal finance CLI built with Claude

A Show HN post introduced **Spltty**, a personal finance CLI for shared expenses. The project is a **Ruby** command-line tool that tracks shared costs, custom splits, and settlements. On Hacker News it has 7 points and 2 comments (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49187132). The author describes it as built with Claude and presented under the Claude/Codex/Fable track on HN.

Spltty stores data in plain **Markdown** files rather than a proprietary database or cloud ledger. The CLI handles shared expense tracking, custom split rules, and settlement calculations against that file-based store. It started as a Claude-managed folder of Markdown and was later wrapped into a Ruby CLI so the same records could be edited, queried, and settled from the terminal.

For engineers who already keep notes and configs in text files, a Markdown-backed finance CLI fits git-friendly workflows: diffs, backups, and review without locking data into a SaaS UI. Builders evaluating Claude-assisted apps can treat Spltty as a concrete path from AI-maintained folders to a real CLI, with the domain logic (splits and settlements) as the durable product and the model as the bootstrap.

Against typical shared-expense products (mobile apps, web splitters, spreadsheet templates), Spltty bets on local files and terminal control instead of accounts and sync. That trades polished multi-user UX for portability and auditability. The HN placement next to other Claude/Codex/Fable work also marks it as part of the wave of small tools shipped after heavy AI-assisted scaffolding, not as a funded fintech launch.

Watch whether the Markdown schema stays stable as features grow, and whether settlement and custom-split rules stay correct under edge cases. Early traction is modest (7 points, 2 comments); useful next signals are whether others adopt the file format, file issues against the split logic, or fork the Claude-folder-to-CLI pattern for other personal data domains.