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A hand-animated coding buddy that lives on your desktop, watches you code, and writes your dev diary.
5 hand-animated characters · each with up to 8 unique animations · 100% local · privacy-first · no account · no telemetry
DevPet is a tiny desktop pet for Windows built with Electron + pure Node. A small hand-animated "coder" character sits on your desktop inside a transparent, always-on-top, click-through window. It watches your coding activity, reacts live, and writes you an automatic developer diary in English or German. It's gamified with XP, levels, coins, and unlockable skins — and it's 100% local: no account, no telemetry, no cloud.
| 🪟 Lives on your desktop | A transparent, always-on-top window that's click-through everywhere except over the pet itself — it never steals focus or blocks your clicks. |
| 🎬 Hand-animated | 5 characters, 1 free + 4 unlockable, each with up to 8 unique animations, rendered as smooth transparent VP9 WebM with real alpha and crossfaded by a 2-layer video engine. |
| 🧠 Watches you code | Three local activity sources — git commits, file edits/bursts, and AI coding sessions (Claude Code + Codex) — each independently toggleable. |
| 💬 Reacts live | On every detected event it plays a reaction, shows a DE/EN speech bubble, and can speak it aloud via free Edge TTS (each skin has its own voice). |
| 📔 Auto dev diary | Daily entries generated from your real activity, grouped by project, with stats — works fully offline, optionally enhanced by an AI provider. |
| 🎮 Gamified | Earn XP and coins as you code, level up with confetti, and spend coins in the built-in Coin Shop to unlock new skins. |
| 🔒 Privacy-first | Everything runs on your machine. The only thing that can ever leave is an optional AI diary summary — with your own API key, only if you turn it on. |
| 🪶 Featherweight | Zero runtime dependencies except Electron. (jimp is dev-only tooling.) |
5 hand-animated coder characters — one free default, four unlockable in the in-app Coin Shop.
| Emoji | Name | Personality | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| ⚡ | Volt | Energetic BVB-yellow spark | Free default |
| 🔥 | Blaze | Fiery and effortlessly cool | Unlock for 600 🪙 |
| 💫 | Nova | Cosmic dreamer with starlight in their eyes | Unlock for 1500 🪙 |
| 😈 | Hex | Dark trickster who codes by candlelight | Unlock for 3000 🪙 |
| 👑 | Root | The crowned superuser — root access to everything | Unlock for 5000 🪙 |
Every skin shares a core animation set, and each one has an exclusive personal signature move that plays once when your mouse approaches.
Idle · Look · Signature (a football/soccer goal celebration ⚽) · Cheer · Stand up · Grab
Idle · Look · Signature (a cool flame snap 🔥) · Cheer · Stand up · Grab
Idle · Look · Signature (a starlight call 💫) · Cheer · Sleep · Grab
Idle · Look · Signature (a dark-power rune circle 😈) · Cheer · Sleep · Grab
Idle · Look · Signature (a royal command 👑) · Cheer · Coding (an exclusive typing animation during AI/coding sessions) · Sleep · Grab
| Animation | When it plays |
|---|---|
| 🪑 Idle | Sits and works at the keyboard. |
| 👀 Look | Reacts and notices when your mouse cursor comes near. |
| ⭐ Signature | An exclusive personal move, unique per skin, plays once when your mouse approaches. |
| 🎉 Cheer | Celebrates on a git commit, on level-up, or when you click/poke it. |
| 😴 Sleep | Dozes off after 75 seconds of inactivity 💤. |
| 🌅 Stand up | Wakes back up when you return. |
| ✊ Grab | A "picked-up" reaction while you drag it around. |
| ⌨️ Coding | Root 👑 only — an extra exclusive typing animation during AI/coding sessions. |
DevPet has three local monitors. They never touch the network — they read activity from your own machine, and each one can be toggled on or off.
| Monitor | What it does | Reward |
|---|---|---|
| 🌱 Git commits | Watches the git history of your watched folders. | 🏆 the biggest reward |
| 📝 File edits / bursts | Notices when you're actively editing files in your watched folders. | small |
| 🤖 AI coding sessions | Reads Claude Code (~/.claude/projects/**/*.jsonl) and Codex session logs to notice when you're pair-programming with an AI. |
medium |
When something is detected, the pet plays a reaction animation, pops a speech bubble comment (DE/EN), and can speak it aloud. A level-up triggers a celebration with confetti and a spoken cheer. 🎊
A separate window that writes your developer diary for you. Daily entries are generated from your real activity, grouped by project, with stats: commits, files touched, AI sessions, and the time span you worked.
💡 The diary works fully offline with a built-in template writer (English and German). Optionally, it can be enhanced by an AI provider for nicer prose and per-project summaries — DeepSeek (cheapest, preferred), MiniMax, or Claude/Anthropic. API keys are 100% optional and are never required for the core app.
Open the diary by double-clicking the pet or via the tray.
Your pet levels up as you code. Every event earns XP and coins 🪙 — commits are worth the most.
| Event | XP | Coins 🪙 |
|---|---|---|
| 🌱 Git commit | 25 | 10 |
| 🤖 AI session | 8 | 3 |
| 📝 File burst | 3 | 1 |
| ⬆️ Level-up bonus | — | +20 |
The level curve is a smooth square-root curve:
| Level | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | … |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Total XP | 50 | 200 | 450 | 800 | … |
Spend your coins in the built-in Coin Shop (inside the diary window) to unlock new skins — Blaze, Nova, Hex, and Root. Your level and coin balance also show in the tray.
| Action | Result |
|---|---|
| 🖱️ Drag | Move the pet anywhere on screen. |
| 🖱️ Mouse-wheel scroll over it | Resize the pet. |
| 🖱️🖱️ Double-click | Open the Dev Diary. |
| 👉 Click / poke | Makes it cheer and speak. |
| 🖱️ Right-click | Opens the context/tray menu. |
Tray menu: switch skin · open diary · reset position to screen · toggle autostart · quit.
The window is click-through everywhere except over the pet itself, so it never gets in the way of your work.
- 100% local. No account. No telemetry. No cloud sync.
- The only thing that can ever leave your machine is an optional AI diary summary — generated with your own API key, only if you choose to enable it.
- API keys are optional and stored locally in
.secrets/or via environment variables. They are never required — without one, the diary uses the built-in offline template writer.
Requirements: Node 18+ and Windows 11 (the pet window is tuned for Windows).
git clone https://github.com/MauricePutinas/devpet
cd devpet
npm install
npm startThat's it — your pet appears on the desktop. 🎉
🪟 Windows one-click: instead of the terminal you can just double-click
Start DevPet.bat— it installs dependencies on first run and launches the pet (no console window stays open).
Optional — enable AI diary summaries: drop an API key file in .secrets/deepseek.key (or .secrets/minimax.key). Otherwise the diary happily uses the offline template writer.
- Electron + pure Node — zero runtime dependencies except Electron. (
jimpis a dev-only asset tool.) - Transparent pet window — always-on-top, click-through, focus-safe, tuned for Windows 11.
- 2-layer video engine — crossfades between transparent VP9 WebM clips with real alpha for buttery-smooth transitions.
- Asset pipeline — raw hand-drawn animations are run through a pipeline (
scripts/normalize-poses.js,scripts/process-chroma.js, …) that chroma-keys, floor-anchors, and exports each pose as a clean transparent WebM. - Local monitors — git, file-watch, and AI-session readers, all on-device.
- Free Edge TTS — gives every skin its own voice with no API cost.
devpet/
├─ src/
│ ├─ main/ # Electron main process
│ │ ├─ monitors/ # git, file & AI-session watchers
│ │ ├─ diary/ # diary store + reporter
│ │ ├─ tray.js · tts.js # tray menu + Edge TTS voices
│ │ └─ progress.js # XP, levels & coins
│ ├─ preload/ # context-bridge API
│ ├─ renderer/
│ │ ├─ pet/ # transparent pet window + state machine
│ │ └─ diary/ # dev-diary + Coin Shop UI
│ └─ shared/ # creatures list, shared helpers
├─ scripts/ # asset pipeline (raw anim → transparent WebM)
└─ assets/
└─ creatures/<id>/ # per-skin WebM animations + thumbnails
Released under the MIT License. Built with ❤️ and Claude by Maurice.
🤖 This section updates automatically on every push via a GitHub Action, so anyone can see exactly what changed and when.
- 🐛 fix: stop .gitignore from excluding src/diary dirs — add missing diary UI + reporter + store
a64749d - ✨ feat: crash-proof config (auto-backup + atomic write + recovery) and live-refresh the diary on focus
31c7e55 - 🐛 fix(changelog): match the bot's update commits by subject prefix, keep human commits
61e5d6c - 🐛 fix(changelog): exclude the bot's own [skip ci] commits from the changelog
4b1c364 - ✨ feat: add one-click Start DevPet.bat launcher (Windows) + README note
bec4eae - 📝 docs: lighter, funnier LinkedIn post (just-for-fun vibe)
14216ba - ✨ feat: initial release — DevPet desktop pet with auto dev-diary, 5 animated skins & gamified coin shop
939642a
⚡ DevPet — your code has a witness now.