agentrocky

A macOS desktop companion app that puts an animated pixel-art character on your screen — powered by Claude Code.

Rocky walks back and forth along the top of your Dock. Click him to open a retro terminal-style chat window and talk to Claude directly from your desktop. When a task finishes, he celebrates with a little jazz dance.

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Features

• Animated sprite — Rocky walks across the bottom of your screen with smooth 60fps motion and 8fps sprite animation
• Jazz celebrations — Rocky dances when Claude finishes a task, and spontaneously jazzes out every 15–45 seconds while idle
• Speech bubbles — Rocky shows status messages while working ("rocky building", "rocky do big science") and celebrates when done ("rocky done!", "fist my bump")
• Retro terminal chat — click Rocky to open a 420×520 dark-themed popover with color-coded output:
  • Green for assistant responses
  • Cyan for tool calls
  • Red for errors
• Persistent session — the Claude Code session survives the chat window being opened and closed
• Live tool call visibility — see exactly what Claude is doing as it runs commands and uses tools
• Background accessory — runs without a Dock icon, floating above all windows on every Space

Requirements

• macOS 13+
• Xcode 15+
• Claude Code CLI installed at one of:
  • ~/.local/bin/claude
  • ~/.npm-global/bin/claude
  • /opt/homebrew/bin/claude
  • /usr/local/bin/claude
  • /usr/bin/claude

Quick Start

git clone https://github.com/snehas/agentrocky.git
cd agentrocky
open agentrocky.xcodeproj

Then press Cmd+R in Xcode to build and run. Rocky appears above your Dock — click him to start chatting.

The session runs with your home directory (~) as the working context, so Claude can run commands and tools relative to ~.

Sprite States

State	Frames	Trigger
Standing	stand.png	Chat window is open
Walking	walkleft1.png, walkleft2.png	Default movement (bounces at screen edges)
Jazz	jazz1.png, jazz2.png, jazz3.png	Task complete or random idle celebration

Architecture

File	Purpose
agentrockyApp.swift	App entry point; 60fps walk loop, 8fps sprite animation, jazz trigger logic
RockyState.swift	Shared @Observable state — position, direction, chat visibility, speech bubbles
ClaudeSession.swift	Spawns and manages the claude subprocess; parses stream-JSON over stdin/stdout
RockyView.swift	Sprite rendering, popover attachment, speech bubble overlay
ChatView.swift	Terminal-style chat UI with scrollable, color-coded message history

How It Works

agentrocky launches Claude Code as a subprocess with stream-JSON I/O:

claude -p --output-format stream-json --input-format stream-json --verbose --dangerously-skip-permissions

Messages are serialized as newline-delimited JSON and streamed over stdin/stdout. The app parses Claude's output in real time, updating the chat log and triggering animations based on task lifecycle events (tool calls in progress, task complete).

The floating window is a transparent, borderless NSPanel set to always float above other windows and appear on every Space — no Dock icon, no menu bar presence.