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🎰 claude-gamba

A slot machine inside Claude Code.<br>You spin while your agent works. Chips come only from the tokens it burns.

No real money. No payments, no deposits, no casino links. This is satire:<br>the only thing you can lose here is tokens, and you were burning those anyway.

English · Русский

<img src="docs/demo.gif" width="100%" alt="The agent reads three files; meanwhile the slot is offered above the prompt and opened: a pixel-art cabinet in the sidebar. The bet goes up to 5, and the fourth spin lands three green checks for +250 under a rain of coins">

_{A real session on Opus 5.5. The reels in this take were told what to land on: nobody films a slot machine until it pays.}

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Install

In a Claude Code session:

/plugin install gamba --marketplace salatmaster/claude-gamba

Then give your agent something to do. A line above the prompt will ask whether you want to test your luck. You do.

_{Needs Claude Code 2.1.287 or later, where mods start. From a shell: claude plugin marketplace add salatmaster/claude-gamba && claude plugin install gamba@claude-gamba. From a clone, for one session: claude --plugin-dir ./claude-gamba.}

The deal

You can't buy chips. You can't get them for free. Your agent burns tokens, the tokens become chips, the chips become nothing. The machine pays back 74%, so you will run out, and then you will have to write another prompt. Some call this a job.

| | | | :- | :- | | 🔥 Chips are burned tokens | One chip per 2,000 tokens your agent spends, paid out while it is still working. There is no other way in. | | 🗯 It has opinions | Over a hundred deadpan lines per language. English and Russian are written separately; neither is a translation. | | 📈 It keeps score on you | Hours waited on the agent, tokens deposited, longest losing streak, rank. One key copies it for the group chat. | | 👾 It is drawn, not typed | A cabinet in pixel art, right in the terminal: reels that roll and bounce, a sign with running lights, coins raining on a big win. |

What it says

| When | It says | | :- | :- | | The agent starts working | Waiting on Claude. Test your luck? | | You spin | Let's go gambling! | | You miss | Aw dangit | | You miss seven times running | 7 misses in a row. Statistically you're due (you're not) | | Three of a kind | I MADE IT BIG!!! 🤑🤑🤑 | | You run out of chips | 90% of gamblers quit right before they hit big | | The agent pays you | Your agent just funded your habit | | The agent finishes | It finished. You didn't | | 80% of your weekly limit is gone | Please gamble responsibly (lol) |

And the line 4 puts on your clipboard:

This week: waited 6.4h on my agent, 212 spins, 1,904,220 tokens deposited. Rank: Redepositor

How to play

/gamba opens the slot at any moment, also in the middle of a turn; /ludka is the same command under its Russian name. Everything else is a digit, so it works on any keyboard layout.

| Key | What it does | | :- | :- | | <kbd>1</kbd> or <kbd>Enter</kbd> | Spin | | <kbd>2</kbd> <kbd>3</kbd> | Bet down, bet up. A click on a number picks it outright | | <kbd>4</kbd> | Copy your stats as one line | | <kbd>5</kbd> | Language: auto, English, Russian | | <kbd>6</kbd> | Sound on or off | | <kbd>7</kbd> | Auto-open: ask, always, never | | <kbd>8</kbd> | Close | | <kbd>Esc</kbd> | Keyboard back to the prompt. The slot stays; /gamba takes the keys again |

You keep typing, the agent keeps working. The slot never takes the keyboard unless you asked for it.

The machine

Three reels. The row in the middle, the one the marks on the frame point at, is the one that counts, read from the left.

| Reels | Pays, per chip bet | | :- | :- | | 🚀 🚀 🚀 shipped | 200 | | ✅ ✅ ✅ tests green | 50 | | 🍕 🍕 🍕 pizza night | 25 | | 🐛 🐛 🐛 | 10 | | 🔥 🔥 🔥 prod is on fire, 💀 💀 💀 | 6 | | the first two match | 2 | | 💰 💰 anywhere on the line | 10 free spins | | 💰 💰 💰 | 25 free spins |

The bet is 1, 2, 3, 5, 10, 15, 20 or 25 chips, and a win is the payout times the bet. With fewer chips than the bet, the spin goes all in with what you have.

💰 is the bonus. It pays nothing on the line, but two or three of them anywhere on it, on a paid spin, grant free spins: no chips taken, the stake of the spin that won them, every win doubled. Free spins grant no more free spins. One spin in about 150 gets there, and a bonus brings back 13 bets on average.

One spin in five and a half pays anything. The return is 74.5%, free spins included, computed exactly over all 9,261 outcomes and checked on 300,000 spins in the tests. The house edge is not a bug.

Chips

One chip per 2,000 burned tokens, at most 20 chips per agent turn. Chips land after every model request, so a long turn pays out while it is still running. Subagents' tokens count.

"Burned" is input + output + cache-write tokens. Cache reads are left out: every tool call re-reads the same context, and counting it twenty times is how you get thousands of spins a turn. On about 1,400 real turns this rate gives a median of 8 chips per turn.

Nothing asks you for settings at install. The rate, the cap and the limit warning threshold are yours to change later: /gamba rate 500, /gamba cap 50, /gamba warn 90. /gamba config shows where they stand.

Stats

Kept between sessions in Claude Code's own plugin store on your machine. Nothing is sent anywhere: the mod makes no network calls, and claude plugin validate on a clone lists everything it touches.

| Stat | What is counted | Window | | :- | :- | :- | | Waited on agent | Wall-clock time of your agent's turns in the main conversation | This week | | Spins | Spins | This week | | Tokens deposited | Burned tokens, as defined above | This week | | Biggest win | The largest single win, in chips | All time | | Miss streak | The longest run of misses | All time | | Payout | Chips won over chips bet | All time | | Rank | By all-time spins: Tourist, Degen at 10, Redepositor at 100, High roller at 500, The house at 2,000 | All time |

The week turns over on Monday, 00:00 UTC. /gamba stats prints the same line as text, for places that draw no panes.

The fine print

<details> <summary><b>When it shows up</b></summary>

While the agent works and the slot is shut, one line above the prompt asks whether to open it: 1 yes, 2 no, 3 always open, 4 don't offer. The digits work straight from an empty prompt. Ignore the line and it leaves with the turn.

"Always" opens the slot by itself every time the agent starts, without taking the keyboard, and closing it does not undo the choice. Claude Code seats a pane nobody asked for only in a terminal 110 columns or wider; in a narrower one you get a yes/no line instead. 7 in the slot changes the same setting, which is the way back from "don't offer".

</details> <details> <summary><b>It fits the room it gets</b></summary>

In a terminal the machine is drawn in pixels, two to a character cell: colored half blocks, no image protocol. A sidebar 44 rows tall gets the whole cabinet from the recording: the sign, the reels, the balance display. A shorter one loses the sign; under 35 rows only the reels stay in pixels, with the balance as text beside the bet, and under 20 the stats step out too. Taller ones add the stats card and the paytable.

Above the prompt the pixel reels stand on the left and everything else in a column beside them. That takes a pane 104 columns wide, a terminal of about 120. In a narrower terminal the words go under the reels: about 20 rows in all, so it happens only where the terminal is 36 rows or taller.

Where the pixels do not fit (a sidebar under 17 rows, a pane under 56 columns, a narrow terminal that is also short) and in the Desktop app, which draws none, the slot is the same machine in text and emoji.

The sidebar needs Claude Code's fullscreen layout and a terminal 110 columns or wider. Otherwise the slot sits above the prompt.

</details> <details> <summary><b>Language</b></summary>

English, unless your prompts are in Cyrillic: then Russian, and it stays Russian. 5 overrides.

</details> <details> <summary><b>Sound</b></summary>

A clack per reel, a coin for a pair, a fanfare for three and a sad one for an empty balance. It plays on macOS only: Claude Code has no player elsewhere. The clips are generated by sounds/make.mjs, no samples from anywhere. 6 mutes.

</details> <details> <summary><b>The warning</b></summary>

At 80% of your weekly plan limit you get one toast per week. It is not helpful.

</details>

Add a phrase or a language

Every phrase is a line in locales/en.ts or locales/ru.ts. A meme that died: delete its line. A new one: add a line.

A new language is one file. Copy locales/en.ts, write it natively (do not translate, the jokes will not survive), and add it to LOCALES in locales/index.ts. Give it a detect pattern if prompts in that language are recognisable by script.

House rules, enforced by the tests where a test can: 60 characters at most, deadpan, never explain the joke, never repeat twice in a row, no names of real people, no brands, no links.

Not in here

Bets on what the agent will do, crash games, blackjack, roulette, leaderboards, anything over the network. And money, in any form.

Develop

claude --plugin-dir .                             # load it, hot-reloads on save
claude plugin validate .claude-plugin/plugin.json # what Claude Code reads from it
claude plugin test .                              # the tests, no session needed

No dependencies and no build step. Written against Claude Code 2.1.287. The pixels were checked by eye in xterm.js, at several sizes, docked and above the prompt, wide and narrow; other terminals should draw the same cells but nobody has looked. The Desktop app gets the text version, checked only by the test kit. The sprites are rows of letters in hooks/pixels.ts: redraw one and it is on the reels. The mods API is early access and may move between releases.

If the tests answer hooks modules are turned off in this process, that is Anthropic's remote switch for mods, not this repo. It comes back on by itself.