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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. |
| 🪶 Lightweight | Still just two native runtime deps — uiohook-napi + nut-js power the macro engine; everything else is pure Node + Electron. (jimp is dev-only tooling.) |
| ⚙️ Automate the boring stuff | Record & replay mouse+keyboard macros, and let DevPet spot repetitive actions and suggest turning them into one — always reviewed & approved by you, never auto-run. |
| 🏆 Real coding companion | Achievements, coding streaks, a Pomodoro focus timer, gentle wellness nudges, and an ask-your-pet chat grounded only in your real stats. |
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.
DevPet is now a lightweight automation tool too. Press Ctrl+Alt+R to start recording your mouse and keyboard, do the thing once, then press it again to stop. You get a humanized, human-readable summary of exactly what you did — real steps, not a step count — so you can review it, give it a name, and save it. Replay any saved macro with Ctrl+Alt+P (or a ▶ click in the diary), and DevPet tracks the time you saved.
🛑 Safety-first by design. Every replay starts with a 3-second countdown bubble so you can switch to the right window (or bail). Replays only ever run on an explicit action — a hotkey or a ▶ click. Nothing is ever recorded, saved, or replayed automatically.
Coding is full of little repeats. DevPet quietly notices when you do the same short action — or type the same phrase — 3× in a row, even across apps (copy in Excel → switch → paste in Outlook), and pops up a friendly "noticed that 3× now…" bubble with a suggestion in the diary to turn it into a macro.
- 👀 It only ever suggests — you review and approve, exactly like a manual recording. It never auto-saves or auto-runs.
- 🔒 Sensitive windows are hard-excluded from typed-text detection — password managers, banking, login/sign-in forms, and
.secretswindows are never buffered, not even transiently. - 🎚️ It's its own explicit, visible toggle (bigger privacy footprint than the rest of the app), off-limits by a single switch.
13 unlockable trophies, each with a progress bar for the ones you haven't earned yet.
| Trophy | How to earn it | |
|---|---|---|
| 📦 | First Commit | Make your first commit |
| 📦 | Committed / 🏗️ Builder | 50 / 250 commits |
| 🦉 | Night Owl | 10 commits after 11pm |
| 🤖 | AI Teamwork | 25 AI coding sessions |
| ⚙️ | Automator | Approve 10 macros |
| ⏱️ | Time Saver | Replay macros 50× |
| 🎯 | Focused / 🧘 Deep Work | 10 focus sessions / 10 hours of focus time |
| 🔥 | Week / Month / 💎 Century | 7- / 30- / 100-day streaks |
| ⭐ | Level 10 | Reach level 10 |
Keep the fire alive — DevPet tracks a daily coding streak that grows every day you're active. Life happens, so you can spend coins on 🧊 freeze tokens that bridge one missed day (just like a streak-freeze) and keep your run going.
A built-in Pomodoro timer (default 25 min) with a live countdown. Finish the full session and it feeds the Focused and Deep Work achievements — stop early and, like a real Pomodoro, you get nothing. Same "finish what you start" incentive.
During a long, unbroken coding stretch (default after 90 minutes), DevPet gives you a gentle stretch/water reminder — "you've been at it a while, quick stretch, water, rest your eyes?" Purely a heads-up bubble tied to real work signals: no extra capture, no diary log, no XP.
A chat right inside the diary where you can ask questions about your own coding activity — "how many commits this week?", "what did I work on most?" The pet answers grounded only in your real stats (no made-up facts), using the same optional AI key as the diary (DeepSeek / MiniMax / Claude). It keeps session-scoped memory so follow-up questions just work.
A tiny read-only, token-gated local web page so a phone on the same WiFi can glance at your pet — level, streak, coins, and the focus countdown. It runs on port 4827 and never exposes diary text, prompts, or keystrokes — just the same handful of numbers already in the tray tooltip.
Want to check on your pet from anywhere, not just the same WiFi? You can opt in to a cloud relay — a Cloudflare Worker you deploy yourself that receives the same tiny status snapshot.
⚠️ This is the only path where any data ever leaves your machine. It's OPT-IN and OFF by default, and even then it only ever sends the tiny gamification snapshot (level, streak, coins, focus countdown, last reaction line) — never any activity content, diary text, macros, or keystrokes.
One click generates a polished PNG "coding week/day" card — commits, files touched, AI sessions, time saved, level, and streak — saved to an exports folder and copied to your clipboard, ready to paste anywhere you want to show off your week. 🎉
- 100% local by default. No account. No telemetry. No cloud sync.
- 🔍 Pattern detection watches local keystrokes/clicks in the background to spot repeats — it's toggleable, sensitive windows are excluded, and nothing is ever sent anywhere. Recorded macros are stored locally.
- 📱 The LAN mobile page is same-WiFi only, token-gated, and read-only — it never accepts writes and never leaves the local network.
- ☁️ The cloud relay is the only opt-in path off your device — OFF by default, and it only ever pushes the tiny status snapshot (no activity content).
- 🤖 The only thing that leaves via AI is an optional diary summary / ask-your-pet answer — 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. 🎉
⚙️ About
npm install: it now also pulls in the two native modules for the macro engine (uiohook-napi+nut-js). On Windows 11 these ship as prebuilt binaries, so there's usually nothing to compile — install just works.
🪟 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 — only two native runtime deps:
uiohook-napi(global input capture for recording & pattern detection) and@nut-tree-fork/nut-js(input playback for macro replay). Everything else is pure Node. (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.
- Macro engine — a recorder, a humanized-step summarizer, and a countdown-gated player, plus click- and typed-text pattern detectors that only ever suggest.
- Tiny local HTTP server — Node's built-in
httppowers the token-gated, same-WiFi mobile page (no extra dependency). - 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
│ │ ├─ automation/ # macro engine + pattern detection
│ │ │ # recorder · player · macroStore · humanize
│ │ │ # patternDetector · textPatternDetector
│ │ │ # keymap · sensitiveWindows · activeWindow
│ │ ├─ diary/ # diary store + reporter
│ │ ├─ streaks.js # daily coding streak + freeze tokens
│ │ ├─ lanServer.js # read-only, token-gated same-WiFi status page
│ │ ├─ 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, macros & ask-your-pet UI
│ │ └─ recap/ # shareable recap-card renderer (→ PNG)
│ └─ shared/ # creatures list, achievements, shared helpers
├─ scripts/ # asset pipeline (raw anim → transparent WebM)
├─ cloudflare/ # optional opt-in cloud-relay Worker
└─ 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: re-encode all 13 new Volt clips — black-frame alpha bug
9d41e41 - ✨ feat: 12 new Volt animation variants + variant-rotation system + auto-copy on selection
30c73aa
- 🐛 fix: config resets can no longer happen (three-layer guard)
6b61229
- ✨ feat: refreshed icon set (sheet 82) + Volt hacking animation + DeepSeek option
ff97e59 - ✨ feat: pixel-art Volt idle + AltGr text capture + trophy/icon art
88d56ce - ✨ feat: automation engine (macro record/replay + pattern detection), achievements, streaks, focus timer, wellness nudges, ask-your-pet chat, LAN companion + cloud relay, shareable recap card; fix German QWERTZ text detection & recap export dialog
b42c615
- ✨ feat: automatic daily & weekly DeepSeek reports + activity cards show edited files and expand on click
52ad5e6
- 🐛 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.