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Zeca: a pixel-art desktop pet that reacts to Claude Code

A developer released Zeca, an MIT-licensed pixel-art desktop pet written in Rust that reacts to Claude Code sessions by celebrating completed tasks, chirping when input is needed, and napping when the user is away. The tool reads session transcripts to detect all running Claude Code sessions, draws as a click-through always-on-top overlay averaging two screen redraws per second while idle and zero while asleep, and only processes metadata such as event names, session IDs, and project folder names, with the daemon bound to 127.0.0.1 and no network access. The pet logic lives in a platform-pure core with fake-clock tests, while Linux/Wayland, macOS, and Windows each implement a small Overlay/Desktop trait pair.

by read2 min views2 publishedOct 8, 2026

Meet Zeca β€” a pixel-art parrot that lives on top of your screen and reacts to Claude Code running in your terminal.

When Claude finishes a task, he celebrates. When Claude needs you β€” a question, a plan to approve, a permission β€” he chirps and calls you. When you step away, he naps. Click him and you jump straight to the terminal of the session that needs you most. Drag him anywhere; he remembers where you put him on each monitor, and follows the one you're working on.

| | Claude finished β†’ a hop, a short flight, confetti β€” and a bigger flight across the screen with a confetti rain when the job was large. | | | Claude needs you β†’ he chirps with a! and a bubble showing the project. If you're not looking, the call escalates β€” always with a ceiling. | | | Working β†’ nearly still, pecking a seed now and then. | | | Nobody around β†’ yawns and sleeps. |

He sees every Claude Code session β€” even ones you opened before installing him β€” by reading your session transcripts, so there's nothing to reload.

It's Rust. All the pet logic β€” the "brain," the animator, the L1–L4 escalation state machine β€” lives in a platform-pure core with fake-clock tests; each OS (Linux/Wayland, macOS, Windows) just implements a small Overlay/ Desktop trait pair behind it, so cargo clippy --target cross-checks all three from one machine. unsafe is confined to the platform crates (Win32/AppKit).

It draws as a click-through, always-on-top overlay and is deliberately cheap: an idle, awake pet averages ≀2 screen redraws per second, and 0 while asleep.

Zeca only ever sees metadata β€” event names, a session id, the project folder name, a hash of an edited file's path. Your prompts, Claude's responses, your code, and window titles never leave the machine, never hit a log, and are never written to disk. The daemon binds to 127.0.0.1 only and talks to no network. (So no, there's no usage telemetry β€” by design.)

The art is CC0 β€” the whole point is your pet. A skin is just a sprite sheet + a small skin.json mapping animations to states, so even a recolor is a one-liner:

macOS or Linux (Hyprland):

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/butkeraites/claude-pet/main/scripts/get.sh | sh

Windows (PowerShell):

irm https://raw.githubusercontent.com/butkeraites/claude-pet/main/scripts/get.ps1 | iex

It's brand new and MIT-licensed. I'd love your feedback, a star, your own sprites, and especially help with more Linux compositors:

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