A pixel crab that watches your AI agents while you wander off

What it does

Clawd on Desk is an Electron-based pixel pet that camps on your desktop and reads agent hooks and logs to animate a crab, cat, or cloud through states like thinking, typing, or sleeping when you step away. It tracks 14 supported agents simultaneously and resolves their session states into a single priority-driven animation. When a long task finishes, the pet celebrates so you know it’s safe to look back.

The interesting bit

The real utility is permission bubbling: instead of leaving Claude Code or Codex waiting in a terminal for tool approval, Clawd pops a floating desktop card with Allow/Deny buttons and global hotkeys. It also tracks subagent spawning, switching from a headphones groove for one parallel task to three-ball juggling when two or more are running.

Key highlights

• Supports 14+ agents including Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Gemini, Qwen, and opencode, with per-agent toggles for pop-up bubbles
• 12 animated states including subagent-specific “groove” and “juggling” modes when parallel tasks spawn
• Three built-in themes (pixel crab, calico cat, cloudling) plus imports from Codex Pet zip packs
• Mini mode hides the pet at screen edge with peek-on-hover; transparent click-through keeps it out of your way
• Session dashboard and HUD show live agent status and can jump focus back to the relevant terminal

Caveats

• Permission bubbles are not available for all agents; Antigravity, Pi, and OpenClaw are currently state-only integrations
• Kiro CLI hook verification is only confirmed on macOS and Windows
• Auto-updates on macOS and Linux require running from a cloned repo; Windows is the only platform with automatic installer updates

Verdict

Worth a look if you juggle multiple AI agents and want ambient awareness of their state. Less useful if you only run short, synchronous prompts or your agent of choice lacks hook support.