Feature request / community showcase: a desktop companion that reacts to Claude Code sessions live (built, open-source, would love to collaborate)
Preflight Checklist
- [x] I have searched existing requests and this feature hasn't been requested yet
- [x] This is a single feature request (not multiple features)
Problem Statement
Claude Code sessions are long and mostly invisible: the agent works for minutes at a time and the only feedback is a scrolling terminal. There's no ambient, glanceable "presence" that tells you how the session is going (wins, errors, streaks) — and nothing that makes the tool feel alive the way IDE mascots do (Codex recently shipped a taskbar pet, for comparison).
I built this as an open-source project: ECHO (https://github.com/icedracon/ECHO) — a pixel-art desktop companion (Tauri, ~45MB RAM, fully local, zero telemetry) that tails Claude Code's JSONL session logs and turns the session into a story in real time:
- successful turns build a win streak -> he executes a "finishing move"; error streaks -> he takes a hit, staggers, gets back up;
- levels/stars accumulate across sessions (persistent memory of the relationship);
- a local "director" learns from the user's reactions which scenes are welcome and which interrupt (no network, no LLM at runtime);
- two characters with 100+ hand-timed pixel animations, a voiced 100-chapter backstory, and a daily boss fight where a demon crawls out of the monitor edge.
It already works with Claude Code today, read-only, via ~/.claude/projects JSONL tailing.
Proposed Solution
Two asks:
1) A small stable interface for companions: today I tail the session JSONL files, which is undocumented and can change any release. A documented event stream (or a hook that emits session lifecycle events: turn started, tool result, success/error, session ended) would let ECHO — and any community companion — integrate without fragile parsing. Even a documented "this is the stable subset of the JSONL schema" note would be enough.
2) If you like the project: I'd love to make ECHO (or a character like it) an official/blessed community companion for Claude Code — happy to collaborate on design, licensing, or an Anthropic-branded character. The full source, art pipeline and release builds are at https://github.com/icedracon/ECHO (Windows exe today; Linux/macOS builds via CI).
Demo GIFs are in the repo README. I can record a 15-second clip of a live Claude Code session driving the companion if useful.
Alternative Solutions
_No response_
Priority
Low - Nice to have
Feature Category
Developer tools/SDK
Use Case Example
- I start a long Claude Code session (refactor across a Rust + TypeScript app).
- ECHO sits on the taskbar and mirrors the session: coding -> he works alongside; a passing test streak -> a finishing-move scene; an error streak -> he takes a hit and gets back up.
- I glance at the taskbar instead of the terminal to know how the run is going — ambient status without alt-tabbing.
- Today this works by tailing ~/.claude/projects/*.jsonl; a documented event stream would make it stable for every user who downloads the exe.
Additional Context
_No response_