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pixtuoid: AI coding agents, visualized as pixel-art coworkers in terminal office

pixtuoid is an open-source tool that visualizes multiple AI coding agent sessions as pixel-art coworkers in a terminal office. Each agent gets its own desk with animations for typing, waiting, sleeping, and token usage. Supports various AI tools like Claude Code, Codex CLI, and more, offering real-time monitoring, multi-floor office, pets, and lo-fi soundtrack.

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Your AI coding agents, visualized as pixel-art coworkers in a terminal office.

pixel + tui + (agent-)oid

🖥︎ Live demo ↗ ·  Architecture ·  Configuration ·  Contributing

Why?

Running several coding agents means alt-tabbing between terminals to find out who's stuck, who's waiting on a permission prompt, and who finished ten minutes ago. pixtuoid puts them all in one tiny pixel-art office you can watch from above — every session is a character at a desk: typing while it works, raising a ? when it needs you, dozing off when it's done.

A little bit Black Mirror, a little bit The Sims — and the most glanceable multi-agent dashboard you'll ever use.

Quick Start

Pick one:

Homebrew (Linux, macOS, or WSL2):

brew install pixtuoid

npm (any OS):

npm install -g pixtuoid

Then launch:

pixtuoid

Press s to open the Sources panel and connect your agent CLI (Claude Code, Codex, Antigravity, Reasonix, …) — pixtuoid wires up the integration for you, no separate install step. In another terminal, start that coding agent. A character walks in from the elevator within a second; disconnect in the same panel and it walks back out. The panel also flags a source whose hooks are connected but broken (run pixtuoid doctor for the full health report).

Keyboard shortcuts: q quit · p pause · s sources (connect / health) · t themes · m sound (+/- volume) · Tab agent dashboard · ? help · ↑↓/jk/PgUp/PgDn floors · click an agent to bring its terminal to the front (f in the dashboard)

More ways to install — Cargo, prebuilt binaries, and Debian .debs — are on the install guide ↗.

Features

Feature Description

Multi-agent office Every agent session gets its own desk — when a floor fills up, a new floor opens automatically

Multi-floor office Hop between floors with PageUp/PageDown, ↑/↓, or j/k — each switch slides into view

Office spaces Cubicles, a meeting lounge, and a pantry — the office is laid out in distinct furnished zones, not just a grid of identical desks

Animated characters Coworkers type, wait with a ?, sleep under little z's, and walk A*-routed paths between desks

Team palette Shirt and pants take their colors from the working directory — same repo, same colors, so the room reads like an org chart. Hair and skin vary per agent; 16 curated outfits

Per-tool monitor glow Each desk's monitor glows with the tool in use — Edit blue, Bash orange, Read cyan — so you can read the whole room at a glance

Token meter Paper stacks up on a desk as its session burns tokens — the pile climbs through 250K / 2M / 16M tiers, a big spend drops a fresh sheet, and hovering shows the exact total (Σ)

Hover tooltips Hover an agent for session duration, tool-call count and active-time %; hover any furniture — desks, sofas, plants, vending machine, printer — for its name

Agent tree dashboard Tab opens a collapsible tree of every floor's agents — each badged with the CLI it runs, color-tinted by what it's doing, with tool-call counts

Office pets A cat or dog (one per floor) roams desks, pantry, sofas; sleeps near idle agents. Click to pet — pixel-art hearts float up

OpenClaw gateway mascot A live OpenClaw gateway shows up as a wandering lobster — the way it moves shows the gateway's health

Office vibes The sun and moon cross the skyline as the day goes by, weather rolls past the windows — rain, storm, snow, fog, overcast, windy, smog — and six themes give the office a whole new look

Lofi soundtrack A lofi soundtrack synthesized entirely in code — no audio files shipped. Day and night tracks follow the office's clock and weather, typing sounds swell with activity, and the door chime, printer and vending machine play as coworkers come and go. m mutes, +/- volume

Floating desktop window pixtuoid floating opens the office in a frameless, always-on-top window — on your desktop, not just in your terminal

Hook-safe The tiny hook shim pixtuoid installs always exits 0 — even a stuck office can never block your agent

▶ See every feature live — floors, themes, weather, pets, the office tour →

Supported Tools

Tool Runs on

Claude Code macOS · Linux · Windows*

Codex CLI macOS · Linux · Windows*

Also supported: Antigravity CLI, DeepSeek-Reasonix, CodeWhale, Copilot CLI, opencode, Cursor CLI, Hermes Agent, Oh My Pi, OpenClaw, Grok Build, Kimi Code CLI.

→ Full tool × OS support matrix on the site

  • experimental — limited testing, unsigned binaries.

Adding a new tool? Implement the Source trait — or, for a hook-only CLI, just a hook decoder + an install Target — then add a row to site/src/sources.json (its supported set is pinned to the code by a test). One file, one channel, done.

Configuration

Everything lives in ~/.config/pixtuoid/config.toml (created on first launch; every key optional) — theme, desk cap, custom pet names, and sprite packs. CLI flags override the file (pixtuoid run --theme dracula).

The setting you'll reach for most is the theme — press t in the TUI for a live-preview picker across six built-in palettes; your pick persists across sessions.

See docs/CONFIGURATION.md for the full key reference (defaults, system-managed keys), the custom sprite-pack workflow, and logging / troubleshooting (diagnostics go to ~/.cache/pixtuoid/log) — or browse it live at /config.

How It Works

Agent CLIs emit events two ways — a hook shim (a 200ms fire-and-forget write to a Unix socket, or a named pipe on Windows, that can never block your agent) and JSONL transcript watching. Both feed one channel; a reducer folds events into office state; the renderer draws it as half-block pixel art. Five Rust crates, zero terminal deps in the core.

Full architecture with diagrams → · single source: docs/ARCHITECTURE.md

Privacy & Security

pixtuoid is local-only and telemetry-free — it makes no network connections, ships no analytics or "phone home", and reads your agent transcripts read-only to animate the office. Your session data never leaves your machine. The dependency set is audited for advisories daily (cargo-deny). For the trust boundaries (the hook shim, the owner-only socket, and how hook installation edits another tool's config), see SECURITY.md.

Contributing

PRs welcome — especially new themes, sprite/decoration polish, and Source adapters for agent CLIs we don't support yet (the ten agent CLIs plus the OpenClaw gateway already wired up are in Supported Tools). See CONTRIBUTING.md for the build/test workflow, conventions, the review process, and how to add a new agent CLI. Architecture and the load-bearing invariants live in CLAUDE.md.

Acknowledgments

Inspired by pixel-agents (VS Code), clawd-on-desk (desktop pet), and Claude Code's Buddy.

License

MIT

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