What If Our Desktop Had Its Own Little AI Companion? Meet Luna

Shraddha Nigam — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 15:27:15 +0000

This is a submission for the MLH x DEV Writing Challenge

Meet Luna 🐱

What I Built

My husband and I have always liked those little animated desktop pets — the tiny characters that move around your screen and make your computer feel a little more alive.

One day, we started talking about them and wondered: What if we could make something like that, but instead of just moving around the screen, it could actually help us?

Imagine having a little companion on your desktop that you could ask questions, give tasks to, or turn to whenever you needed something — without constantly switching between browser tabs and different applications.

That conversation became the idea behind Luna.

Luna is an AI desktop companion that lives on your screen and gives you a more natural way to interact with AI. The idea is simple: instead of always going to AI, bring AI closer to where you already work.

From an Idea to a Project

When I started building Luna, I wanted to bring together two things: the fun of having an animated desktop pet and the usefulness of an AI assistant.

I built it using Electron, React, and TypeScript, with Gemma, Google's open-weight AI model family, powering its AI experience.

Electron made it possible to create a desktop application, while React and TypeScript helped me build the interface and manage the application logic. I integrated Gemma through Google's GenAI tooling to let users interact with AI through Luna's chat interface.

But turning the idea into something real was definitely not as simple as imagining it!

Getting separate desktop windows to communicate, making sure messages reached the right place, and handling AI responses reliably took plenty of debugging. Sometimes, fixing one thing led to another problem, and I had to go back and figure out what was happening.

Those moments were frustrating, but they also taught me a lot. I realised that building a useful AI product isn't just about the model. The interaction, the interface, and all the little details matter just as much.

Why Gemma?

I wanted to explore how Gemma could be used in a real desktop application rather than just another chatbot interface.

For me, the interesting part was bringing an AI model into an experience that already feels familiar. We are used to opening websites and typing into chat boxes, but what if interacting with AI could feel more like talking to a little companion that is already there?

That's the direction I wanted to explore with Luna.

What's Next for Luna?

Luna is still a work in progress, and there is a lot I want to improve.

I'd love to make the companion feel more alive, improve its everyday interactions, and explore features that help it understand what's happening on the screen and assist with tasks more naturally.

The bigger idea is to make Luna more than a cute character on the desktop. I want it to become something genuinely useful — a companion that combines personality with practical AI assistance.

What I Learned

This project reminded me that interesting ideas don't always start with a big technical problem. Sometimes, they start with something small that you enjoy and a simple question: What if?

For us, that question came from watching animated desktop pets. For me, it turned into an opportunity to learn more about Electron, desktop application development, AI integration, and the challenges of bringing different pieces together into one experience.

And honestly, seeing the idea become a real project has been one of the most satisfying parts of the journey.

I'm excited to keep building Luna and see where this idea goes next. 🐱

Demo

💻 Explore the source code: https://github.com/ShraddhaNigam19/AI-Companion

I'd love to know: If you could have a little AI companion living on your desktop, what would you want it to do?