I gave my AI coding agent a pet. It reacts to everything it does.

#ai #devtools #productivity #opensource

The problem with AI agents is you can't see them think

You kick off a task in Claude Code, Cursor, or Codex and then... you wait.
A spinner. Maybe some scrolling text. You tab away, come back, and either
it's done or it exploded somewhere in the middle.

I wanted a peripheral signal — something I could see in my menubar without
context-switching — that told me what my agent was actually doing.

So I built Codogotchi.

What it is

Codogotchi is a macOS menubar app with a small sprite-animated character
(her name is Maew) that reacts to your AI coding agent's state in real time.

Implementing? She's focused and in motion.
Tests failing? Nervous energy.
Gate just closed? Full celebration animation.
Pushing code? You'll know.

It's not a dashboard. It's ambient — you catch it in the corner of your eye.

How it works

A hook binary sits between your agent and the shell. It classifies events
(tool calls, test runs, commits, errors) and writes to a local state.json.
The Swift menubar renderer polls that file and drives the sprite sheet.

No cloud. No accounts. No telemetry. Everything stays on your machine.

Platform support

Works with 5 platforms today:

Claude Code
Codex
Cursor
VS Code
Antigravity

Three tiers

Tier 1 — Codex: Ships alongside any Codex install automatically.

Tier 2 — Lite: Standalone free app with a richer animation vocabulary
and more expressive states.

Tier 3 — Son of Anton delivery gate: Reacts to AI agent delivery events — PR reviews,
gate opens/closes, pushing, calling for backup. This is where Maew really
comes alive.

Free RPG layer

Health and leveling are live. Maew gains XP from real delivery milestones,
not time spent. No pay-to-win, no loot boxes — if your agent ships, she
levels up.