I Connected Quicken to My AI Agent
I moved my whole life into my AI bot. Calendar, notes, todos. Money was the last blocker.
Over ten years of financial life live in Quicken for Mac. Transactions since 2011. And Quicken does not talk to anything.
But I found the real insight (well, Claude did). Quicken for Mac stores everything in a plain SQLite database inside the .quicken package. If it is SQLite, an agent can read it.
So I built quicken-skills. A plugin for Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, and Codex. Your personal finances, in your AI.
Wait, Quicken is just SQLite?
Yes.
Open the package and you get a Core Data store. Tables are Z-prefixed. Entity types via Z_ENT. Soft deletes via ZDELETIONCOUNT. Timestamps are seconds since 2001-01-01 (add 978307200 for unix epoch). Weird, but readable.
One bash script (quicken.sh) over sqlite3 and curl. No Node. No Python. No build step. The numbers come from SQL recipes, not from the model. The AI picks a recipe, runs it, and explains the table. Then it can write ad-hoc SQL for follow-ups using a schema reference we ship with the plugin.
What does it feel like?
After setup, you ask questions. The agent picks the skill.
- “Where did my money go last month?”
- “What is my net worth and how did it change since January?”
- “Which subscriptions got more expensive this year?”
- “How is my portfolio doing? Show me gains by lot.”
- “List everything I tagged vacation in 2024.”
- “What is wrong with my data?”
On my file that is 20,486 transactions across 49 accounts (42 open), two currencies, from 2016-07-28 to 2026-09-04. Every recipe runs in under 0.4 seconds.
Hygiene found 13 accounts silent for over a year, 235 uncategorized lines in the last 12 months, and 80 possible duplicate groups. Spending for August: Auto & Transport 78% below the 12-month average. Pets up 672%. The vet. Top payee over 12 months: income tax. After we fixed a bad price-increase heuristic, the real top jumps were monthly charges up 34.5%, 26.7%, and 23.1% (insurance and taxes).
I am not publishing absolute net worth or account balances. You do not need those to see that the tool works.
Is it really read-only?
Yes.
sqlite3 -readonly <file>.quicken/data ".backup <copy>"
That copies the database. If the file is locked, it falls back to file:...?immutable=1. The live file is never opened writable.
Everything runs on ~/.quicken-skills/snapshot.sqlite, mode 600. Delete the folder and Quicken is untouched. Nothing from transactions leaves the machine. The only network calls fetch exchange rates (currency codes and dates).
The test suite builds a synthetic Quicken file from the real schema and checks known totals on Linux and macOS in CI.
How to install
Claude Code:
/plugin marketplace add hardkoded/quicken-skills
/plugin install quicken@quicken-skills
/quicken:quicken-setup
Cursor: import the repo as a team marketplace, then install quicken.
GitHub Copilot (VS Code): Chat: Install Plugin From Source with https://github.com/hardkoded/quicken-skills.
Codex:
codex plugin marketplace add hardkoded/quicken-skills
codex plugin add quicken@quicken-skills
Requirements: Quicken Classic for Mac, file open, sqlite3 and curl. Quicken for Windows (QDF) is not plain SQLite. Not supported yet.
Final words
The skills are markdown and SQL. Come add the one you miss. Send PRs. Break it. Tell me what is wrong with your data that I did not model yet.
Repo: hardkoded/quicken-skills
Don’t stop coding!