Agent Buddies

At a glance

Agent Buddies is an open-source library of small animated characters that show what an AI agent is doing: idle, listening, thinking, working, talking, waiting, success or error. Your app passes in a state and gets back a character, and a picker lets your users choose one of ten starter buddies. It comes in React, Web Components and SwiftUI versions. It is a v0.1 preview, and the npm packages are not published yet.

Good fit

Developers building a chat or agent interface who want a friendly status indicator their users can personalize. Adapters translate Claude Agent SDK, Vercel AI SDK and OpenAI Responses events into buddy states without making any API calls, so connecting it to a stream you already have only takes a small mapping step. Developers can also limit which buddies users may pick.

Consider something else when

Skip it if you need a published npm dependency today or a companion for a terminal agent or VS Code, since both of those are still only on the roadmap. If you just want to watch your own agents work rather than ship an interface to other people, Pixel Agents covers that inside VS Code.

Start here

Open the gallery and run the zero-key demo. You type a prompt, and a simulated agent moves a buddy through each state without an API key or a network model call. To build with it, clone the repository, run npm ci and npm run check, then put BuddyPicker and AgentBuddy in a React component and set the state to thinking.

Cost and requirements

The code is MIT licensed and no price is listed. The starter art is CC-BY-4.0, so you must credit Agent Buddies contributors. React is a peer dependency. The SwiftUI package targets macOS 13+ and iOS 16+. To make a new buddy, you need an image-capable Codex session to generate the master image, and optional Python dependencies for editing the art.

Limits to know

The iOS target has not been tested on a device. Pack hashes catch corrupted files when checked against a trusted catalog, but they are not signatures or proof of authorship. A remote catalog on another host has to allow cross-origin requests. On a first launch with no network, the fallback to Koko works only if you ship the bundled assets with your app.

Related work

• Pixel Agents (context)
• lil agents (context)

Still unclear

• When the npm packages will be published, and whether the package names will change after the owner's review.