pi-buddy

A pi extension that gives you a Tamagotchi-style virtual pet in your terminal — inspired by Claude Code's /buddy. 18 species, 5 stats, deterministic from your username, with speech bubbles that react to agent activity.

Display

The buddy parks on the right side of the editor and animates idly (3-frame cycle every ~2s, plus an idle blink). Speech bubbles pop up to its left when it has something to say.

                                                  /\___/\
                          ╭────────────────────╮ ( ¬ ¬ )
                          │ of course it broke │  > ‾ <
                          ╰────────────────────╯ /(  |  )\
                                                    ¯  ¯

Each species has 3 idle frames (subtle tail wags, ear flicks, particles) so the creature feels alive. State is persisted to ~/.pi/pi-buddy/state.json.

Species

Your species is deterministically picked from a hash of os.userInfo().username (override with PI_BUDDY_SEED):

duck · penguin · dragon · octopus · capybara · axolotl · cat · fox · owl · panda · raccoon · hedgehog · frog · hamster · narwhal · sloth · turtle · unicorn

Each species has a stat bias — owls start with high Wisdom, dragons with high Chaos, capybaras with high Patience, and so on.

Stats

Five stats on a 0–100 scale, drifting based on what you do together:

• Debugging — bumps on bash/edit tool runs.
• Patience — drains every tool execution; recovers a bit between sessions.
• Chaos — spikes on tool errors; calms each turn.
• Wisdom — gains slowly per completed turn.
• Snark — rises on errors and stays high if you ignore the buddy.

Mood is derived from the stat mix (happy, curious, worried, grumpy, default) and tints both the accent color and the speech-bubble pool.

Commands

• /buddy or /buddy stats — show the full panel (species, age, stat bars, lifetime sessions/turns/tools)
• /buddy mute / /buddy unmute — silence speech bubbles
• /buddy rename <name> — give your buddy a custom name (max 32 chars)
• /buddy adopt — re-roll species and reset stats (asks first)
• /buddy reset — keep the species, restore stats to baseline (asks first)

Install

pi install git:github.com/Acelogic/pi-buddy

Or add to ~/.pi/agent/settings.json:

{
  "packages": ["git:github.com/Acelogic/pi-buddy"]
}

Update

pi update git:github.com/Acelogic/pi-buddy

Then /reload inside pi.

Configuration

Environment variables (all optional):

• PI_BUDDY_PLACEMENT — belowEditor (default) or aboveEditor
• PI_BUDDY_ALIGN — right (default) or left
• PI_BUDDY_BUBBLE_MS — how long a speech bubble stays on screen, in ms (default 6000, min 500)
• PI_BUDDY_BLINK — set to off to disable the idle blink ticker
• PI_BUDDY_ANIMATE — set to off to freeze the creature on frame 0
• PI_BUDDY_SEED — override the species hash seed (default os.userInfo().username). Set this to share buddies across users or pin a species in CI.

Notes

• The buddy is non-critical — failures to read or write its state file are swallowed silently so they never break a pi session.
• Speech bubbles fire on a probability per event (e.g. ~60% on agent_start, ~35% on tool start) so the buddy doesn't spam you.
• All stat changes happen in-memory and persist on turn_end and session_shutdown.
• This is a homage to Claude Code's official /buddy, not a port — pi has no buddy bridge, so the species is reseeded from your local username.