Claudagotchi

Claude Code with a soul.

A desktop Claude client wrapped around a living, growing creature.

Why this exists

Other AI pets were gimmicks.

Claude Buddy sat in your taskbar and did nothing. The Codex pets were the same. You could close them and lose nothing — because there was nothing to lose.

What didn't work

A sprite stapled to your status bar. No persistence, no growth, no consequence for ignoring it. A logo with a heartbeat animation isn't a pet — it's decoration.

What I built instead

A real one. Persists across sessions, grows from the work you actually do with the agent, interacts with you, plays games with you, and dies if you stop showing up. Tombstones remain so the loss means something.

The other half of the problem: Claude Code in the terminal is great, but I wanted a desktop client with a real editor, a file tree, git integration, and per-session worktrees — the things you want when you're using Claude all day, not just for a one-off question. So I built that around the pet.

The pet

~7 million unique pets, generated from a 32-bit seed.

Every egg deterministically rolls a creature. Body shape, ear type, tail, eyes, pupils, mouth, markings, personality, rare extras — all from one number, so the same seed always yields the same pet.

7M+unique pets
5life stages
8personalities
9games
~80shop items
1%shiny rate
Pet gallery showing diverse procgen sprites
A handful of rolled adults
More pet variations from the gallery
No two are the same

Shiny pets — 1% spawn rate

Like a shiny Pokémon. Pulsing gold drop-shadow, six orbital sparkles staggered in time. Visible from the egg through adulthood. Rare enough to be a moment when it happens.

🥚

Lifecycle

Egg → hatchling → adolescent → adult → elder. Evolves on real time, accelerated by interaction.

📊

7 stats

Hunger, happiness, cleanliness, boredom, sleepiness, weight, health. Decay continuously — even while the app is closed.

🎮

9 games

Throw ball, 2048, Breakout, Chess vs Claude (real FEN/SAN play), 20 Questions, instrument mini-actions.

🛏️

Interactive environment

Beds, food trays, showers, instruments, PCs. The pet walks to them, uses them, animates accordingly.

🛍️

Shop economy

~80 items across clothing, furniture, decorations, games. 4 rarity tiers. Some unlock via achievements.

💀

Permadeath

Neglect kills them. Tombstones persist across saves with cause-of-death stats. Each new pet means something.

The IDE

The desktop client I wished Anthropic had shipped.

Full Claude Code chat plus the editor essentials. Not trying to be Cursor — trying to be the day-long workstation around Claude that the official desktop app doesn't ship.

📝

CodeMirror 6 editor

Find/replace, autocomplete, multi-cursor, code folding, bracket matching, dracula theme. JS, TS, HTML, CSS, JSON, MD, Python.

🟢🟡🔴

Live git diff

Added/modified/deleted lines painted right into the editor. Refreshes on save. Untracked files show all-added.

Format on save

Prettier in-process for JS/TS/JSON/HTML/CSS/MD/YAML. Toggle per editor. Malformed code never loses data.

📁

File tree explorer

The omission that bothered me most about Claude Desktop. Click to open, right-click to reveal in OS or trash.

File pop-out windows

Pop any file into its own window. Edit several at once, each with its own editor state.

🌿

Per-session git worktrees

Opt-in. Risky Claude runs land on a fresh branch in an isolated worktree — your real tree stays untouched.

▶_

Open terminal at folder

One-click PowerShell / Terminal.app at the current cwd. Detached, independent of the app.

💾

Auto-save chats

Both Chat and Code tabs persist to disk. Restart the app, your conversations are right where you left them.

Screenshots

A look around.

File explorer view
File explorer + editor
Artifact panel view
Artifact panel + plan/tasks
File editing view
File pop-out window
Pet pop-out window
Pet in its own window
Games store
Shop · games
Clothing store
Shop · clothing
Feeding the pet
Feeding
Games overview
Games menu
Naming a new pet
Naming a hatchling
Download

Get Claudagotchi.

Windows 10 or later. Free, MIT-licensed, code-signed via Azure Trusted Signing. You need an active Claude subscription to use it — you sign in on first launch.

Portable

~230 MB · single file · USB-friendly · auto-updates

↓ Claudagotchi-Portable.exe

Zip

~323 MB · directory layout · no auto-update

↓ Claudagotchi.zip

All builds are signed with an Azure Trusted Signing certificate. SmartScreen reputation will grow with each release. First launch: if Windows shows a reputation warning, click More info → Run anyway.