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Agent Buddy

A little desk companion for your AI coding agents.
Watch what Claude Code (and a dozen other agents) is doing — live — on a tiny touchscreen on your desk. Approve tool calls with a tap, glance at tokens and context, and let the buddy celebrate when a long task finishes.

Agent Buddy turns the invisible work your AI coding agent does into something you can see on your desk. A small background daemon on your machine listens to your agent's activity through its hook system and streams it — over Bluetooth — to a companion device that shows live telemetry (tokens, context usage, what the agent is doing right now) and pops tool-approval prompts you can answer with a tap. Start a long task, walk away, and come back when the buddy lights up to tell you it's done — or needs you.

This repository is the open-source software side of Agent Buddy: the cross-platform desktop app and the agent-buddy daemon that bridge your agents to the device. It's MIT-licensed and built to be inspected — the daemon wires hooks into your agent configs and reads your session activity, so you should be able to read exactly what it does. (The device firmware is closed-source and lives in a separate repository; you don't need it to use, audit, or contribute to anything here.)

Works on macOS, Windows, and Linux. Requires the Agent Buddy hardware device for the full on-desk experience.

Features

Multi-agent support

One daemon tracks every supported agent at once, each session resolved independently and surfaced on the device.

• Claude Code — full integration via Claude Code's hook system, including live tool-approval bubbles on the device
• Qwen Code and CodeBuddy — live state plus on-device tool approvals
• Codex CLI, Gemini CLI, Copilot CLI, Cursor Agent, Kiro CLI, Kimi Code CLI, Antigravity CLI (agy), opencode, Pi, OpenClaw, and Hermes Agent — live activity + session telemetry on the device (these keep tool approvals in their own terminal/TUI)
• Run them side by side — multiple agents at once all drive the same buddy

Each agent's hooks are reconciled automatically on install and on every daemon start — added when missing, repaired when stale, and never duplicated. Your own non-buddy hooks are always left untouched.

Live telemetry on the device

• Real-time state — the buddy reacts to what your agent is doing: idle, thinking, running tools, working through subagents, waiting on you, or done
• Session dashboard — tokens used, context window remaining, and current activity, on a two-column landscape display
• An RGB indicator + ambient presence — a glance from across the room tells you whether your agent is busy, blocked, or finished

Tap-to-approve

• On-device permission prompts — when Claude Code (or Qwen Code / CodeBuddy) requests a tool it needs approved, the buddy surfaces it on screen
• Approve or deny with a tap — answer on the device instead of switching back to the terminal; answer in the terminal first and the prompt clears itself

One-click setup & updates

• Self-installing — open one file; the app installs the background service and wires your agent hooks on first run. No config files to edit
• Over-the-air firmware updates — the app flashes new device firmware wirelessly with one click, and only nudges you when there's actually a newer image
• Self-updating app — a signed, in-place update on macOS; a guided download elsewhere
• Clean uninstall — one command (or the tray menu) removes the hooks, the daemon, the service, and all local state. The device is never touched

Built to trust

• Fully open source (MIT). The part that touches your machine is the part you can read
• Local-first. Your session activity goes from your agent to your daemon to your device over Bluetooth. Nothing about your sessions is sent to us
• Signed & notarized on macOS, so it opens without a Gatekeeper warning

Quick Start

Download the latest installer from GitHub Releases — one self-contained file per platform that bundles the app, the background daemon, and the device firmware images:

• macOS — universal .dmg (Apple Silicon + Intel), signed & notarized
• Windows — Setup.exe
• Linux — .AppImage

Open it and the app self-installs the background service and your Claude Code hooks on first run. Then pair your buddy and start a session — it comes to life.

Prefer the command line? One-line installers:

# macOS / Linux
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nateschnell/agent-buddy/main/install.sh | sh

# Windows (PowerShell)
irm https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nateschnell/agent-buddy/main/install.ps1 | iex

Piping a script to your shell? Read it first — both install.sh and install.ps1 are short and in this repo.

Requirements: Claude Code (or another supported agent) installed, a machine with Bluetooth, and an Agent Buddy device.

Uninstall

agent-buddy uninstall          # macOS / Linux / Windows

…or use the desktop app's tray menu → Uninstall…. It reverses everything the install did and leaves your device and its firmware alone.

The hardware

The Agent Buddy device is a compact ESP32-S3 touchscreen companion — a capacitive-touch landscape display with an RGB LED that sits on your desk and gives your agent a physical presence. The software in this repo is free and open; the device is the optional piece that makes it tangible.

Where to get one:

You can use, audit, and contribute to everything in this repository without a device — the daemon runs and the hooks wire up regardless; the buddy is the render target that brings it to life.

Build from source

The bridge is a single Rust crate that builds the daemon and the desktop GUI:

cd bridge
cargo build --release --features gui   # builds: agent-buddy (daemon/CLI) + agent-buddy-app (GUI)
cargo test

What's in here

Path	What it is
bridge/	Rust crate → two binaries: agent-buddy (background daemon / CLI) and agent-buddy-app (desktop GUI, --features gui)
packaging/	Per-OS packagers for the desktop downloads (macos/make-app.sh, windows/installer.iss, linux/make-appimage.sh); macOS signing in packaging/macos/NOTARIZE.md
install.sh / install.ps1	The one-line installers
.github/workflows/	Builds + publishes every platform's package on each release tag

Contributing

Agent Buddy is open to contributions — bug reports, feature ideas, new agent integrations, and pull requests are all welcome. Open an issue to discuss something, or send a PR directly.

A few good places to start:

• Add or improve an agent integration — the hook-wiring and per-agent state vocabulary live in bridge/; each agent is a profile, so adding one is mostly declarative
• Polish the desktop app — the GUI is egui (bridge/src/bin/app.rs)
• Fix a bug you hit — file it with repro steps, or send the fix

Please run cargo test and cargo build --features gui before opening a PR.

License

Source code is licensed under the MIT License.

The device firmware is closed-source and distributed only as prebuilt images bundled with the releases here. This is an independent project for use with AI coding agents; it is not affiliated with or endorsed by Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, or any other agent vendor. No cryptocurrency — this project has no token, coin, NFT, or airdrop.