Peon Pet
An animated Orc Peon that lives in your editor sidebar and reacts to your AI coding agent events in real time — powered by peon-ping.
Editor support: Peon Pet works with any editor that runs peon-ping hooks — including Cursor, Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode, and Kiro.
VS Code + GitHub Copilot is not yet supported out of the box. VS Code is actively developing native agent lifecycle hooks (inspired by peon-ping); once those land in the extension API this extension will be updated to support them. In the meantime, see pierceboggan/peon-ping-vscode for an early community integration.
Features
Live animations — the orc reacts to peon-ping events:
| peon-ping event |
Animation |
SessionStart |
Waking up |
UserPromptSubmit |
Typing |
PermissionRequest |
Alarmed |
PostToolUseFailure |
Annoyed |
Stop (task done) |
Celebrate 🎉 |
PreCompact |
Alarmed |
| Idle (30 s) |
Sleeping |
Session dots — coloured dots above the orc show how many AI sessions are active (green = hot, dark = warm, grey = cold). Hover for the working directory. Sessions across all open Cursor windows are shown — this is a peon-ping design: all agents write to a single shared state file. Hover tooltips and peon-ping's desktop notifications identify which workspace each session belongs to.
Drag to reposition — click and drag the orc anywhere in the sidebar panel.
Custom character packs — drop your own sprite atlas into ~/.openpeon/characters/ and switch with one command.
Requirements
- peon-ping installed and running (
brew install PeonPing/tap/peon-ping)
peon-ping writes event state to ~/.claude/hooks/peon-ping/.state.json. The extension polls this file every 200 ms — no daemon or socket required.
Installation
From the VS Code Marketplace
Search for Peon Pet in the Extensions panel, or install via:
ext install smcqueen.vscode-peon-pet
From VSIX (manual)
- Download the latest
.vsix from the Releases page.
- In Cursor / VS Code:
Cmd+Shift+P → Extensions: Install from VSIX…
Usage
Commands
| Command |
Description |
Peon Pet: Change Character |
QuickPick to switch between installed character packs |
Settings
| Setting |
Default |
Description |
peon-pet.character |
orc |
Active character pack ID |
peon-pet.size |
medium |
Sprite size: small (150px), medium (200px), large (250px) |
Custom Characters
Drop a folder into ~/.openpeon/characters/<your-character>/ containing:
~/.openpeon/characters/
my-character/
sprite-atlas.png ← required
manifest.json ← optional
borders.png ← optional overlay
bg.png ← optional background
sprite-atlas.png
A single PNG sprite sheet with 6 columns × 6 rows of animation frames.
| Spec |
Value |
| Format |
PNG with alpha |
| Grid |
6 cols × 6 rows |
| Recommended frame size |
512 × 512 px (atlas = 3072 × 3072) |
| Style |
Pixel art — must read clearly at 150–250 px display size |
Row layout (fixed order):
| Row |
Animation |
| 0 |
Sleeping |
| 1 |
Waking |
| 2 |
Typing |
| 3 |
Alarmed |
| 4 |
Celebrate |
| 5 |
Annoyed |
manifest.json (optional)
{
"name": "My Character",
"author": "Your Name",
"description": "A short description."
}
After adding a pack, run Peon Pet: Change Character — it re-scans and shows the new entry immediately.
Contributing
See CONTRIBUTING.md for how to set up the development environment, submit bug reports, or contribute a new character pack.
Artwork
The built-in Orc Peon character (media/assets/orc-sprite-atlas.png and related assets) is original AI-generated pixel art. It was created using an image generation model from a custom prompt describing an original orc character; it is not derived from, extracted from, or based on any third-party game assets.
Acknowledgements
This extension would not exist without these projects:
- peon-ping — the AI coding event sound system that this extension hooks into for its animations and session tracking.
- peon-pet — the original macOS Electron desktop pet that inspired this VS Code port. The sprite atlas format, session-dot concept, and character spec all originate there.
- vscode-pokemon by jakobhoeg — the VS Code extension that inspired the overall approach: webview-based pet, sidebar placement, custom character support, and project structure conventions.
License
MIT
