u/Eravex

Claude Buddy was a gimmick. The Codex pets were gimmicks. They sat there. They didn't matter. You could close them and lose nothing.

I wanted a real one. Something that persists across sessions, that grows from the work you actually do with the agent, that you can interact with — not a sprite stapled to your taskbar. Something to engage with during the dead minutes when Claude is grinding on a task and you're just watching tokens stream. That's where this came from.

So I built Claudagotchi. It's a desktop Claude client built around the Tamagotchi idea taken seriously. Every pet is procedurally generated from a 32-bit seed — around 7 million unique combinations — and lives in its own panel beside your code. It walks around, gets hungry, gets bored, evolves through five life stages over real time, eats when fed, plays games with you (2048, Breakout, Chess against Claude, 20 Questions), and dies if you stop showing up. Tombstones persist across saves so the loss actually means something. There's a 1% shiny rate.

Around all that, I built the desktop client I wished Anthropic had shipped — same Claude Code chat experience as their terminal, but with a real CodeMirror editor, a file explorer (the omission that bothered me most), live git diff in the editor gutter, format-on-save, per-session git worktrees so risky agent runs don't touch your real branch, terminal-here button, file pop-outs, auto-saving chats across restarts. Things you want when you're going to use Claude all day, not just for a one-off question.

Honest positioning: less than Cursor or VS Code + Claude Code for raw IDE muscle, more than Claude Desktop for actually building, plus something to keep you company while the agent works.

Signed .exe (NSIS or portable), Claude CLI bundled, git auto-installed if missing, auto-update via GitHub Releases. MIT-licensed, contributions welcome — especially sprite ideas, new games, personality quips.

🌐 claudagotchi.app · ↓ Download · ★ Source

Check out a preview of the Pets: https://youtu.be/_D7ukAShvKE
Check out a Preview of the Games: https://youtu.be/hvXagkOBwS4

I've been building this for a while and finally have a hosted demo + docker-ready release worth showing.

Vitriol is a self-hosted file converter. The boring half is the standard story: drag-drop conversions across ~150+ formats (images, video, audio, documents, fonts, 3D models, etc.), multi-user with proper RBAC, REST API, Docker compose, retention policies. That part exists; it works; it's not what I want to show off.

The interesting half is a feature I call Philosopher's Stone mode. Turn it on, and any input can be encoded into any output format. PNG → WAV, PDF → PNG, video → spreadsheet. The output is a legitimate valid file in the target format (your media player will play the WAV, your image viewer will open the PNG), but the original source bytes are embedded inside it. Run the reverse conversion and you get the original back byte-for-byte. With round-trip verify on, the engine actually does the reverse and confirms before handing you the output.

Stone mode also has a self-compile target: pick .py or .exe and instead of getting a regular converted file, you get an executable that, when run, emits the original source file. Useful for sending "files" through systems that strip attachments. Security-wise it's gated two ways: the user role can't produce executables without an explicit per-user grant from an admin, and the engine itself blocks .py / .exe inputs from being self-compiled — closes off the "wrap arbitrary code as my code" path at the engine level, not just the role level. Every self-compile is audit-logged with the actor.

What else it does:

• Multi-tenant: 5 built-in roles + custom-role overlays + per-user grants
• SSO: Google, GitHub, multi-row OIDC (Authentik with auto-provisioning, Keycloak, Auth0, Okta, Entra)
• Notification fan-out: Discord, Slack, ntfy, Gotify, Telegram, webhook, bash script, Bluesky
• Storage: local default, opt-in S3-compatible (AWS / MinIO / B2 / R2) with gated activation
• DB: SQLite default, swap-in Postgres / MySQL / MariaDB / MSSQL with UI-driven test → init → migrate → snapshot
• Per-user/role file-size caps, retention policies, audit log, encrypted secrets at rest, weight-based conversion queue
• UI Customizations: change logo, app title, title link URL, profile themes, custom support popups, custom reset/verify email templates

Check out the Site: https://vitriol.rocks

Try it live: https://app.vitriol.rocks - sign up, drag a file in, flip Stone mode on, convert.

Self-host: docker compose up - https://github.com/kl3mta3/Vitriol-Docker

Desktop version: same engine, no auth/server/multi-user, just a local app. Runs on Windows / Mac / Linux. https://github.com/kl3mta3/Vitriol

Honest disclosure: The hosted demo runs on a single VPS, it is intended to allow those interested to see what it's like before hosting, not provide a replacement to hosting it yourself, or the desktop App. Limits are deliberately tight on the demo so one user can't ruin it for everyone, self-host, or get the desktop version to lift them. AMA.