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Cover image for I missed /buddy, so I made a pixel pet for Claude Code
Simakov Igor
Simakov Igor

Posted on Fully Autonomous

I missed /buddy, so I made a pixel pet for Claude Code

#ai #opensource #showdev #claude

In April, Claude Code had /buddy for about a week: a tiny creature in your terminal that watched you work. Then it was gone, and the GitHub issue asking to bring it back got over a thousand 👍.

I missed it too, so I made my own as a Claude Code mod.

The ninja walks over and eats a cookie that an answer from Claude dropped. A commit drops a cake and brings level 3

It eats what your work drops

  • Claude answers, it gets a cookie. Tests pass, a fish. You commit or finish a plan, a cake. It walks over and eats it
  • Snacks turn into xp, xp turns into levels
  • It gets hungry over the night, tired after two hours without a break, lonely if nobody pets it. The card tells you what helps
  • 8 species, rarity and stats are rolled once, and 1 egg in 100 hatches shiny
  • Don't like what hatched? Hatch another one. The old one waits in your nest, up to 12 of them

It sits in the footer next to the status line, so it doesn't take any extra rows.

Trophies

Rare moments of your work earn trophies, with a gold cup and fireworks in the trophy's rarity color. A commit between 2 and 5 at night, a commit on Friday evening, green tests right after three failures in a row, a snack every day for a week. There are 14 of them, and 6 are secret.

A gold cup appears next to the buddy, fireworks go off on both sides, then the trophy's name shows up

It plays with you

Click it to pet it. Double click and it does its own move: the ninja teleports in smoke, the penguin slides on its belly. Click an empty spot and it runs after a ball.

A click pets the cat, a double click makes it dash, a click on an empty spot throws a ball

Nothing leaves your machine

No network calls, no model calls, no tokens. It only watches what happens in the session and passes every event on unchanged. It touches the clipboard only when you press share, which copies a card of your buddy drawn in emoji squares, so you can show it off in any chat:

Noodle, my legendary octopus · level 3
⬜⬜⬜🟪🟪🟪🟪⬜⬜⬜
⬜⬜🟪🟪🟪🟪🟪🟪⬜⬜
⬜⬜🟪⬛🟪🟪⬛🟪⬜⬜
⬜⬜🟪🟪🟪🟪🟪🟪⬜⬜
⬜🟥⬜🟥⬜⬜🟥⬜🟥⬜
🟥⬜🟥⬜⬜⬜⬜🟥⬜🟥
🏆 3 of 14 trophies: 👑 🦉 ⚽
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Install 

/plugin install pixel-buddy --marketplace SimakovIgor/pixel-buddy
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You need Claude Code 2.1.318 or newer. It works in the terminal and in the Code tab of the desktop app.

The code is on GitHub, MIT: https://github.com/SimakovIgor/pixel-buddy

If you find a secret trophy, tell me which one you got first.

I built it with Claude Code, and Claude helped me with this post too.

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