Give Claude Code a mascot: a desktop companion that celebrates every finished run

Claude Code is fast, quiet, and headless. It does its work in the terminal and, when it is done, it just stops. There is no fanfare, no little animation, no signal across the room that the thing you asked for is ready. If you have ever kicked off a long run, tabbed away to read something, and come back ten minutes later to find it finished eight minutes ago, you already know the problem. Pawpilot fixes it by giving Claude Code a mascot: a pixel-art cat or dog that lives on your desktop and reacts the instant a run completes.

Why a mascot beats a notification

You could pipe Claude Code into a system notification, and plenty of people do. The trouble with banner notifications is that they are easy to ignore. They stack up, they get muted, and after a week your brain filters them out entirely. A character is different. When a small animal on your screen suddenly leaps into the air and celebrates, you notice, because motion in your peripheral vision is exactly what human attention is tuned to catch. It is a friendlier signal than a red badge, and it carries real information: the run is done, come back.

Pawpilot's headline trick is the Agent Done Jump. The moment Claude Code finishes a turn, the companion leaps and celebrates. There is also a Needs-Input Alert: when an agent is stuck waiting on you, the companion comes to fetch you, so runs never stall silently while you stare at a different window.

How the Claude Code integration works

The integration is a single local hook and nothing leaves your machine. Pawpilot runs a listener on 127.0.0.1, and you point Claude Code's Stop hook at it. Add this to ~/.claude/settings.json:

{
  "hooks": {
    "Stop": [
      {
        "hooks": [
          { "type": "command",
            "command": "curl -s http://127.0.0.1:4317/agent/done >/dev/null" }
        ]
      }
    ]
  }
}

That is the whole setup. When Claude Code ends a turn, the hook fires, Pawpilot picks it up locally, and the companion does its celebration. The listener lives entirely on localhost, so there is no telemetry and no network round trip. You can toggle agent reactions on or off any time from settings. The full walkthrough is in the setup docs.

It is not only Claude Code

The same local endpoint backs the other agents Pawpilot understands: Codex CLI, Cursor, Antigravity, and Kiro. Point each tool's completion hook at the same address and the companion reacts to whichever one you are running. If you split your day across a couple of different agents, you get one consistent signal for all of them.

What the companion does the rest of the time

A mascot that only moved once per run would be a gimmick. Pawpilot is a full desktop pet between celebrations. It follows your cursor, its eyes track your pointer across the screen, and it kneads in rhythm while you type. Hover over it and it purrs and floats little hearts. Step away and it wanders off looking for you until you are back. It runs Pomodoro focus and break cycles and naps through your breaks. You pick from five breeds, three cats and two dogs, and tune its size and opacity so it sits in the corner of your editor without getting in the way.

Privacy, because it is watching your typing

Some of the best motions need to know when you are typing, never what you type. On macOS that means granting Input Monitoring, which reads keystroke timing only to drive animations. Nothing is logged, stored, or transmitted, and there is no analytics anywhere in the app. Your license itself is verified offline on your machine using an Ed25519 signature, so activation works with no internet at all.

Get set up

Pawpilot runs on macOS and Windows. It is a one-time license, not a subscription, and one key activates every machine you own. You can try the companion free in your browser first on the playground, then grab a key and wire up Claude Code in about five minutes.

If you want Claude Code to feel a little more alive, download Pawpilot, or see the pricing for the lifetime license. Once your pet is celebrating your runs, you can also give it your own face with the Custom Companion add-on. Your terminal will never feel quite as lonely again.