I built pixel-art cats and dogs that live above your Claude Code prompt (free plugin)
I love having pets in my editor, so inspired by vscode-pets I built my own version for Claude Code! It's a plugin that puts little pixel-art cats and dogs in a band above your prompt in the terminal.
What they do:
- walk back and forth and sit down every so often
- run around while Claude is working
- fall asleep after two minutes of nothing happening
- /pet pat makes a heart pop up over them
You can have up to 6 pets. Cats and dogs each come in 4 colours, and your pets are saved between sessions. You manage them with /pet add, /pet rename, /pet remove, /pet hide and so on.
How I built it: the whole thing was built with Claude Code over about two days. I started by having Claude write a short spec for v1. Then it built the plugin from that: the renderer, the animation and the /pet command. The art took the most back and forth. The sprites are drawn in code as grids of characters, so I'd look at them, tell Claude what looked off, and it would redraw them. It took a few passes to get there. Claude made the pets bigger (16x12 up to 20x16 px), fixed a walk cycle that was playing backwards, made the dogs look more like dogs and gave the cats their loaf sit. It also wrote a little script that renders every pet and pose into one PNG, which made checking the art a lot easier. At the end I had it do a cleanup pass for readability and add tests, linting and CI.
Art is definitely not my strong suit, so I'd love to go back and touch it up at some point.
It's free and open source. To try it, run these in Claude Code:
/plugin marketplace add e-newton/claude-pets
/plugin install pets@claude-pets
e-newton/claude-pets
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vscode-pets ⭐ 4.2k A VS Code extension that adds animated pets to the editor window for developers. 🔗 tonybaloney/vscode-pets #opensource t.co
I built pixel-art cats and dogs that live above your Claude Code prompt (free plugin) I love having pets in my editor, so inspired by vscode-pets I built my own version for Claude Code! It's a plugin that puts little pixel-art cats and dogs in a band above your prompt in the terminal. What they do: - walk back and forth and sit down every so often - run around while Claude is working - fall asleep after two minutes of nothing happening - /pet pat makes a heart pop up over them You can have up to 6 pets. Cats and dogs each come in 4 colours, and your pets are saved between sessions. You manage them with /pet add, /pet rename, /pet remove, /pet hide and so on. How I built it: the whole thing was built with Claude Code over about two days. I started by having Claude write a short spec for v1. Then it built the plugin from that: the renderer, the animation and the /pet command. The art took the most back and forth. The sprites are drawn in code as grids of characters, so I'd look at them, tell Claude what looked off, and it would redraw them. It took a few passes to get there. Claude made the pets bigger (16x12 up to 20x16 px), fixed a walk cycle that was playing backwards, made the dogs look more like dogs and gave the cats their loaf sit. It also wrote a little script that renders every pet and pose into one PNG, which made checking the art a lot easier. At the end I had it do a cleanup pass for readability and add tests, linting and CI. Art is definitely not my strong suit, so I'd love to go back and touch it up at some point. It's free and open source. To try it, run these in Claude Code: /plugin marketplace add e-newton/claude-pets /plugin install pets@claude-pets e-newton/claude-pets