Someone built a thing where the AI coding agent running on your Mac shows up on your Apple Watch as a little animated blob that talks to you. It’s called Chums, it’s open source, and the pitch on the README is almost defiant: “The AI you already use. Now on your keychain, your backpack or your wrist.”
I keep coming back to this project because it’s a clean example of a pattern we’ve been tracking: the most interesting new AI tools aren’t new models or new subscriptions — they’re better front-ends to the agents you already pay for.
What it actually is #
Chums pipes the Claude Code and Codex agents already running on your Mac to an Apple Watch and an iPhone. The interaction is deliberately physical: hold the watch screen, say what you want, let go. Your Mac transcribes the speech, routes it to the agent, and the agent gets to work — the same Claude Code or Codex session, now reachable from your wrist.
The clever bit is the feedback. Each agent is rendered as a character that acts out its state: listening, thinking, working, waiting for you, done, blocked. Tool calls appear on screen as they run. When the agent wants permission — say, to run git push — you hold the card to allow or tap × to deny, right there on the watch. Replies come back as one short spoken sentence in the character’s own voice, plus a scrollable transcript. You can even ask for a screenshot and get back a zoomable picture.
The iPhone app is the roomier version of the same thing: type or talk, send photos and files, approve actions, and reconfigure an agent — what it runs on, its model, permissions, voice, and “soul.” Artifacts open live: ask for a chart and it renders an interactive HTML page you can drag across; PDFs scroll, videos play, Office docs open in Quick Look. There are Home Screen and Lock Screen widgets that even answer approval prompts.
The three “no”s #
Chums leads with what it isn’t, and that’s the actual product thesis:
- No new model — your agents run on Claude Code or Codex, on your Mac.
- No new subscription — Chums is free and open source; the AI plan you already have does the work.
- No Chums account — no login, no cloud. The watch and iPhone talk to a hub onyour Mac over your ownTailscale network.
The README is pointed about why this matters: “Everyone is building a cute new assistant: another subscription, another app, another company holding your data. Chums is a team of agents on the AI you already pay for.” That’s the same argument we made about Cindy, which reuses your Claude Code and Codex subscriptions instead of billing you for API tokens. The subscription you already have is an underused asset, and a wave of tools is now built entirely around reaching it from new places.
The characters are the fun part #
There are seven of them, and the design conceit is that there’s “no big brand to obey,” so each character is built with a different rendering technique: Noodle is a real-time 3D tube computed live on the watch; others are Blender renders, vectors, a single animated line, strokes on springs, plain eyes, pixels. Each is its own agent with its own session, voice, and personality. You switch between them by tapping faces at the top-left; an off-screen agent’s news arrives as a haptic tap on your wrist.
This rhymes with the Claudia “open character” idea we wrote about — identity as something portable and installable — except Chums makes the character functional: the animation isn’t decoration, it’s the status readout. You glance at your wrist and the blob’s posture tells you whether your build is running, blocked, or waiting on your approval. It’s a genuinely nice answer to “how do I monitor a long-running agent without staring at a terminal.”
The honest caveats #
This is not an App Store download. You build the apps from source in Xcode 26, run a hub on an Apple-silicon Mac, and need watchOS 26 / iOS 26 on paired devices. First setup is 20–30 minutes plus waiting on Xcode and DNS propagation. The friendly touch: you can paste a single line into Claude Code or Codex —
Set up Chums for me: clone https://github.com/lcoutodemos/chums and follow its AGENTS.md.
— and let the agent do the install, stopping only when it needs your hands for signing in or enabling Developer Mode. Fitting, given the whole project is about agents doing the work.
So the barrier is real: this is for people who already live in Claude Code or Codex and own the Apple hardware. But that’s also exactly who it’s for. If you’re already paying for the agent and already running it on your Mac, Chums is a free, private, genuinely delightful way to carry it on your wrist — no new model, no new bill, no one else holding your data.
Repo: github.com/lcoutodemos/chums · site: chums.club.