clawd-tales

A pixel Clawd that acts out what Claude Code is doing, in a band above your prompt.

Claude Fables draws a model-written cartoon of your session in the desktop app. clawd-tales does it in the terminal from templates, so it costs no tokens.

The 45-second /tales demo: Clawd hatches, helpers walk in, tests fail and bugs drop, Claude calls for you, a storm rolls in, and Clawd grows up.

Glance down and you know what Claude is doing. A red ! and a jumping Clawd means it is waiting on you. Rain means the context is nearly full.

Every tool call gets a pose and a one-line caption. Claude reads a book for Read, digs for Edit, sneaks for Grep, runs for Bash, flies for web search. Subagents walk in as their own critters, colored by model.

A minute in the band

You ask Claude to fix a failing test. Clawd runs off to pytest and three bugs drop onto the ground. It reads the test file with a book open, then digs into the code. A red ! appears and Clawd jumps: Claude wants to run a command. You approve within a few seconds, and Clawd beams with hearts. The tests go green, Clawd eats all three bugs, and a turn that long ends in a dance.

What it shows

| Happening in Claude Code | In the band | |---|---| | A tool call | Clawd's pose and a caption naming the file, pattern or command | | A subagent starts | A helper walks in: purple for Opus, teal for Sonnet, green for Haiku, gold for Fable | | A subagent finishes | It runs back to Clawd and they cheer, with hearts | | A permission dialog opens | Clawd jumps next to a red ! and the caption turns red | | A test run fails | Bugs drop onto the ground, one per failing test (up to 8) | | The tests go green | Clawd eats the bugs | | A todo list | Pending items sit on the ground as pellets. Finishing one is a gobble | | Context fills up | Clouds at 50%, rain and an umbrella at 70%, lightning at 85% | | The turn ends | A nod if it took under 4 seconds, a hop up to a minute, a dance up to five, and past that a flag planted at the summit. Then Clawd sits, yawns and falls asleep. The band hides after 3 minutes; your next prompt wakes Clawd, and a new helper brings the band back | | A plan limit hits 100% | Clawd sleeps until the reset time. A minute before, it stretches, and once the limit resets it's up | | Claude waits on a subagent | Clawd puts on headphones. With two or more out, it juggles one ball per helper, each in that helper's color | | Three or more subagents out | Clawd wears a tie. It's the boss now | | An MCP tool call | A ring of color spreads from Clawd. Each server gets its own color | | Every 50K tokens | Confetti, and the count in the turn's last caption | | Claude thinks for a while between tool calls | A thought bubble fills in over the pose it is holding | | Five clean tool calls in a row | A combo counter. At ten, Clawd wears a crown | | A subagent fails | It trips, then walks back to Clawd for a pat on the head | | Four or more subagents out at once | The idle ones walk in a line behind the first one | | Two errors in a row | Clawd goes cross-eyed with stars circling. A third flips the table | | You approve a permission prompt quickly | Hearts. Leave one waiting past 30 seconds and Clawd starts to sweat, with a timer in the caption | | The conversation is compacted | Clawd sweeps the stage with a broom and the weather clears | | A session starts | Clawd drops in from the sky. A resumed session gets a wave hello. The very first session hatches Clawd from an egg | | 200 tool calls | The hatchling loses its eggshell cap and grows up into whatever work it did most: a scholar (reading), a detective (searching), a builder (editing), a hacker (commands), an explorer (the web) or a captain (helpers). Each wears its own hat, and the form can change as your habits do |

Small things

• Thank Claude in your prompt and Clawd blushes with heart eyes. Start with "no" or "wrong" and it rubs its head, brows up, and can't look you in the eye.
• Clawd dresses for the job: a wizard hat in plan mode, a hard hat two minutes into a long turn, and shades for the rest of a turn once it has earned the crown.
• git commit wraps a parcel and pops confetti. git push sends a paper plane off the stage. rm -rf makes Clawd cover its eyes. Package installs drop boxes from the sky.
• A command that isn't found sends the sl train across the stage.
• While it waits for you, Clawd waves, winks, scratches its head, looks around and watches a butterfly. A longer wait and it goes fishing. Asleep, it dreams about the last thing it did.
• Clawd glances left and right now and then, and looks over when a helper walks in. Sitting, it breathes.
• The sky follows your clock: sun by day, stars at night. Between 1 and 5 am, Clawd wears a nightcap and keeps a mug of coffee nearby.
• Halloween, Christmas, New Year's, Valentine's Day and April 1st each get a costume or something extra.
• Now and then a whale, a UFO or the train passes through. One session in a hundred brings a shiny Clawd.

Under the caption, a status line shows ctx 74% · 5h 22% · 7d 23%, plus the todo count and a roster of the helpers. Numbers turn yellow at 80% and red at 95%.

The band shrinks with your terminal: the full band at 8 rows, no sky at 6, then a single line.

Install

Needs a Claude Code build with mods (function hooks). Built and tested on 2.1.289; run claude --version to see yours. After installing, start a new session and type /: if /tales isn't in the list, the mod didn't load, and your build probably doesn't support mods yet.

claude plugin marketplace add plaxagoras/clawd-tales
claude plugin install clawd-tales@clawd-tales

Start a new session, then run /tales demo.

To try it for one session without installing:

git clone https://github.com/plaxagoras/clawd-tales
claude --plugin-dir ./clawd-tales

Commands

| Command | What it does | |---|---| | /tales demo | Plays a short story: a hatching, helpers, bugs, pellets, weather, a permission call and growing up. Your own Clawd's progress isn't touched | | /tales calm | One frame a second, and nobody wanders between tool calls | | /tales lively | Back to 5 frames a second (the default) | | /tales off / /tales on | Hide or show the band | | /tales | Shows the current state | | /tales hat <name> | Puts on a top hat, grad cap, captain's hat, wizard hat, hard hat, deerstalker, beanie, pith helmet or eggshell (none takes it off). Saved between sessions | | /tales face <name> | Glasses, shades or a mustache (none takes them off). Saved between sessions | | /tales scarf on / off | Each project gets its own scarf color, picked from the project folder, so you can tell repos apart. On by default | | /tales holiday <name> | Previews a holiday look until the next restart (auto goes back to the calendar) |

Your on/off and calm settings are saved between sessions.

How it works

It is a Claude Code mod: a plugin of function hooks in hooks/register.tsx. It listens to tool.call, agent.spawn, classic.PermissionRequest, classic.UserPromptSubmit (for plan mode), session.measure and the turn events, and draws with ui.render on the AbovePrompt band. Each terminal cell is two pixels (▀ with a foreground and a background color).

• No network, no model calls. It only reads what the hooks hand it, and the only things it saves are your settings (on/off, calm, hat, face, scarf) and Clawd's tool-call tally in Claude Code's plugin store.
• Test results come from the Bash output of commands that look like test runs (npm test, pytest, cargo test, go test and similar).
• Subagent end is detected by polling $.agent.list().

Limits

• A test runner whose command isn't on the list never drops bugs.
• A helper's finish can show a second or so late (about 5 seconds in calm mode), because the end is polled.

Add a pose

Poses are pixel rows in sprite() in hooks/art.ts. Which tool gets which pose and caption is beat() in hooks/story.ts. Run claude --plugin-dir . and your edits reload as you go; claude plugin test . runs the tests. Pull requests with a short GIF of the new pose are welcome.

Credits

The walk and cheer frames and the base palette come from Claude Fables by henrik-thevibe (MIT). See NOTICE.

Clawd is Anthropic's mascot. This is an unofficial fan project, not affiliated with Anthropic.

License

MIT