A desktop companion for Claude Code

Claude Code is fast, quiet, and headless. It works in the terminal and, when it finishes, it just stops. No fanfare, no signal across the room that the thing you asked for is ready. Pawpilot is a pixel-art cat or dog that lives on your desktop and reacts the instant a Claude Code run completes, so you stop losing minutes to runs you assumed were still going.

What Pawpilot does with Claude Code

The headline trick is the Agent Done Jump. The moment Claude Code finishes a turn, the companion leaps and celebrates in the corner of your screen. There is also a Needs-Input Alert: when Claude Code is stuck waiting on you, the companion comes to fetch you, so a run never stalls silently while you are reading something in another window. Motion in your peripheral vision is exactly what human attention is tuned to catch, which is why a character beats a banner notification you have already learned to ignore.

Setup is one hook

You point Claude Code's Stop hook at Pawpilot's local listener. 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. The listener lives entirely on localhost, so there is no telemetry and no network round trip. The full walkthrough is in the connect docs.

Why a programmer actually wants this

If you kick off long Claude Code runs and tab away to Slack or a browser, the ambient signal is genuinely useful. It is the difference between a pet that decorates your screen and one that participates in your workflow. Between celebrations Pawpilot is a full desktop companion: it follows your cursor, its eyes track your pointer, it kneads in rhythm while you type, purrs when you pet it, and wanders off looking for you when you step away. It runs a built-in Pomodoro that naps through your breaks, and you pick from five breeds across cats and dogs.

The typing reactions read only keystroke timing, never content, and there is no logging anywhere. If Claude Code is your main agent, the best desktop pets for programmers guide covers what else to look for, and the Claude Code mascot walkthrough goes deeper on the setup.

Get set up

Pawpilot runs on macOS and Windows as a one-time purchase, no subscription, and one key covers every machine you own. Try the companion free in your browser on the playground, then download it and check the pricing for the lifetime license. Once it is celebrating your runs, you can give it your own face with the Custom Companion add-on.