pets (pi package)

A switchable menagerie of coding-agent companions for pi. Each pet is a character with a soul: ASCII art, quips, a personality, and a matching theme. /pet swaps them, an optional perch keeps your pet ever-present in the TUI where it says things, and /pet soul lets a pet color the agent's tone.

  ,___,       N Y X                 /\_/\      S P R O C K E T
  (o,o)       night-owl coding     ( ^.^ )     lazy-genius fox
  /)_)        "nocturnal by...      > ~ <      "ship it, then nap"
   " "                               ^ ^

Install

pi install npm:@guygrigsby/pi-pets

The roster

Pet	Who	Palette
nyx 🌙	night-owl coding agent	purple / cyan synthwave
sprocket 🦊	lazy-genius fox	amber / rust sunset
bolt 👾	8-bit code goblin	phosphor-green CRT
marlo 🍄	cozy code sprite	moss / cream cottagecore
pixel 🐈	glitch cyber-cat	hotpink / cyan vaporwave
ember 🐉	clean-code dragon	gold / crimson
grumble 🐻	grumpy cave bear	slate / ember
sol 🦎	sunbathing gecko	warm light theme

Each has a full character sheet (its "soul"). Read one with /pet bio.

Install

pi install github.com/guygrigsby/pi-extensions/pets

Or from a local checkout:

pi install /path/to/pi-extensions/pets -l

Commands

Command	What it does
/pet	Show the active pet and list the rest.
/pet <name>	Switch to a pet (also switches to its theme).
/pet next	Cycle to the next pet.
/pet perch	Toggle the ever-present perch widget on/off.
/pet soul	Toggle channeling the pet's soul into the agent's tone.
/pet bio	Print the active pet's soul.
/pet say	Make the pet say something now.
/pet off	Restore the built-in header and hide the pet.

Your choices persist across every session (stored in ~/.pi/agent/pets.json).

Ever-present mode

/pet perch docks the pet below the editor where it stays put and pipes up:

/)_)  nyx: "compiles after midnight"

It rotates to a fresh quip every 60s while idle, and says something when a turn finishes. The idle timer is fire-and-forget: it only swaps the widget line, never nudges the model or triggers a turn.

Soul

/pet soul folds the active pet's character sheet into the system prompt as a tone layer only — the framing tells the model to let the persona color phrasing, never its reasoning, correctness, or engineering judgment. Turn it off and the agent is its plain self again. The ✦ on the footer badge shows when a soul is active.

Adding your own pet

A pet is one markdown file: YAML frontmatter for the mechanics, the body for the soul. Drop pets/mypet.md:

---
name: mypet
display: M Y P E T
subtitle: does the thing
emoji: "🐾"
art:
  - " (o o)"
  - " /|_|\\"
  - "  ^ ^"
  - '  " "'
taglines:
  - hello
  - still here
  - beep
palette:
  bg: "#141018"
  accent: "#88ccff"
  accent2: "#ffd479"
  heading: "#ff7ad0"
  ok: "#8ce29a"
  warn: "#ffd479"
  err: "#ff6a8a"
  code: "#8ce2d0"
  muted: "#9a94b0"
  dim: "#5a5470"
  border: "#3a3450"
  text: "#eee8ff"
  comment: "#6a6488"
---

Mypet is who it is. A sentence or two of essence.

## Temperament
...

## Voice
...

## Lore
...

Then build:

npm run gen

That parses every pets/*.md and writes generated/pets.json (data + soul, read at runtime) and themes/mypet.json (the full 51-token pi theme, derived from your compact palette; light vs dark is detected from bg). Don't hand-edit generated/ or themes/ — edit the pet's .md and regenerate.

art is 3-5 short lines, mascot on the left. The middle line doubles as the pet's face on the perch, so make it a good one. The body after the frontmatter is the soul that /pet soul channels and /pet bio prints — write as much character as you like.

Layout

pets/
├── pets/*.md               # the characters: frontmatter + soul (you edit these)
├── generated/pets.json     # built runtime bundle (data + soul) — do not hand-edit
├── themes/*.json           # built pi themes from each palette — do not hand-edit
├── extensions/
│   ├── pets.ts             # pi glue: header, badge, perch, soul, /pet, persistence
│   └── pets-core.mjs       # pure logic: loading, rendering, theme expansion
├── scripts/gen.mjs         # pets/*.md -> generated/pets.json + themes/*.json
└── tests/pets-core.test.mjs

Build pipeline: pets/<name>.md → npm run gen → generated/pets.json + themes/<name>.json.

Notes

• The header and perch render only in interactive terminal mode; they're no-ops in -p/print and JSON modes.
• /pet <name> switches the theme too. Want the character without recoloring? Reselect your theme via /settings after switching.
• Runtime has zero dependencies (reads generated JSON). The generator uses yaml (a devDependency) to parse frontmatter; it isn't needed to run the extension.
• npm test runs the unit tests (node --test): discovery, markdown parsing, rendering, and that every generated theme has all required tokens.