ramarivera/coding-buddy

What it solves

Coding Buddy provides a persistent, animated ASCII companion for AI coding assistants like Claude Code, Pi, and Oh My Pi. It restores a "buddy" feature that was removed from Claude Code, ensuring the companion survives software updates by using the Model Context Protocol (MCP) rather than binary patching.

How it works

The project integrates with AI harnesses through several stable extension points:

• MCP Server: Provides tools and system prompts that instruct the AI to trigger reactions at the end of turns.
• Skills: Implements slash commands (e.g., /buddy) to view stats and interact with the companion.
• Status Line: Renders animated ASCII art and speech bubbles in the terminal's status line.
• Hooks: Uses shell wrappers to detect events like errors or test failures to trigger specific buddy reactions.

Companion identities are generated using a deterministic algorithm (wyhash + mulberry32) based on the user's account UUID, ensuring the same buddy is consistently assigned to the same user.

Who it’s for

Developers using Claude Code, Pi, or Oh My Pi who want a gamified, visual companion to accompany their coding sessions.

Highlights

• Update-Proof: Built on MCP, meaning it doesn't break when the host AI tool is updated.
• Diverse Menagerie: Includes 19 different species with rarity levels (Common to Legendary) and unique stats (Debugging, Patience, Chaos, Wisdom, Snark).
• Canned Fallbacks: Uses a fallback pool of lines to ensure the speech bubble is never silent, even if the AI model fails to react.
• Cross-Harness Sync: Optional support to share a single buddy identity across different AI coding tools via environment variables.
• TUI Picker: An interactive terminal user interface to search for and save specific buddy species and rarities.