dragon-lair

A Claude Code mod: a small one colour pixel dragon that lives at the right end of the line above the prompt. It acts out what Claude is doing and breathes fire when something worth celebrating happens. Part of the Claude Code Arcade in claude-plugins.

What it does

• While Claude works the dragon shows it: it hops when you send a message, raises its head while Claude thinks, bends over the page while a file is read, paces while a file is edited, beats its wings for shell commands and takes off for web and MCP tools.
• Each subagent hatches from an egg as a small dragon that flies beside it, flaps faster as the subagent works, and flies home when it finishes (or falls when it fails).
• A failed tool drops its head; two minutes of quiet and it falls asleep.
• Moments: a small one is a puff of smoke, a medium one a breath of fire, a big one a blaze, and a merge, release, deploy, streak or record a roar.
• Gold builds up with every moment and is kept between sessions. Under the dragon: Lv 3 ◆ 55 ★ 9 ⚒ 58 (level, gold, wins, tool calls).
• /dragon shows the hoard; /dragon puff, fire, blaze and roar show off each size; /dragon hide puts it away and /dragon show brings it back.

Moments

Every Arcade game spots the moments worth celebrating on its own, so each one installs alone with no dependency. Coding or not, a session has them.

| Size | Moments | |---|---| | Small | A finished turn, a file saved, every 10th tool call in a turn | | Medium | A commit, a push, a pull request opened, tests passing, any skill run, a subagent finished, a plan approved, an MCP tool that sends, creates, posts or publishes, a long document written, praise in your message | | Big | A merge, a release (gh release create, npm publish), a production deploy (vercel --prod, netlify deploy --prod, fly deploy and others), tests back to green after failing, a deliverable made (PDF, DOCX, XLSX, PPTX, images), a published page, a finished task list of three or more, a marathon turn (10 minutes, 30 tools, no errors), three subagents done in one turn, a 3, 7, 30 or 100 day streak, the 100th, 1,000th or 10,000th tool call |

A commit that says "nothing to commit" or a push that says "Everything up-to-date" counts for nothing. Tool calls inside subagents do not count; their finishing does.

Settings

All optional; every one is empty by default. Set them in /plugin (the plugin's settings) or in settings.json under pluginConfigs.

| Setting | What it is for | Example | |---|---|---| | big_skills | Skills whose run is a big moment (every other skill is medium) | release-notes, publish-report | | quiet_skills | Skills that celebrate nothing | commit | | big_commands | A regular expression of shell commands whose success is big | make ship | | medium_commands | A regular expression of shell commands whose success is medium | terraform apply | | praise_words | Extra words that count as praise, on top of the built-in list (thanks, great, perfect and a few in other languages) | nice one, cheers |

What it reads and does

• Reads: the name of each tool Claude runs and whether it failed; for shell commands, the command line and whether its output says nothing changed; for file writes, the file name and its line count; skill names; the words of your message (only to spot praise); subagent start and finish.
• Keeps: its own score and state in Claude Code's plugin store on your machine.
• Draws: one block at the right end of the line above the prompt, and an occasional notice.
• Hooks: skill.prompt only notes which skill ran, so a finished skill can count as a moment; it passes the skill's prompt on unchanged. command.run answers its own /dragon command and no other.
• Privacy: see PRIVACY.md.
• Never: changes, blocks or delays a tool call or a message; sends anything anywhere (no network calls, no telemetry); reads file contents beyond counting lines of a file Claude writes.

Install

Needs Claude Code 2.1.287 or later (mods). Tested on 2.1.289.

/plugin marketplace add mutlumehmet/claude-plugins
/plugin install dragon-lair@mehmetmutlu

A mod runs inside Claude Code with your permissions. Read the code before you install any mod.

It draws in a terminal (including an editor's integrated terminal) and in the Code tab of the Desktop app; in the VS Code chat panel and claude -p it runs but draws nothing. Several Arcade games can be open at once, but the line above the prompt fills up: /<command> hide puts one away, /<command> show brings it back.

Known gaps

• A subagent that the engine reports without an id at spawn time may show a second hatchling briefly until its id is known.
• The dragon is drawn with block characters; a terminal with tall line spacing shows thin gaps between rows.

About

Made by Mehmet Mutlu, part of claude-plugins. More of his work at mehmetmutlu.dev.

License

MIT