lil agents
Animated dock characters, each holding its own coding-agent session
lil agents puts small animated characters — Bruce and Jazz — in the macOS dock, drawn as transparent HEVC video rather than sprite sheets. Click one and a themed popover terminal opens on its own Claude, Codex, Copilot or Gemini session; the character walks around and blows a thinking bubble while the model works. Four visual themes, slash commands in chat, and Sparkle auto-updates. MIT-licensed, free, open source, currently beta v1.2.2 and needs macOS 14 or newer plus at least one agent CLI already installed.
Read this repo when you need the trick, not the app: transparent-background HEVC video is how it gets smooth, alpha-blended character animation into a native macOS surface without a sprite pipeline, and that technique transfers to any mascot or idle-state animation. As a tool it is a novelty next to Vibe Island — pick lil agents for personality and a free MIT codebase, Vibe Island for actual multi-agent oversight. Beta v1.2.2, macOS 14+, and it assumes the agent CLIs are already on PATH.
Why it is here. It answers a question most agent UIs dodge — what an agent should look like while it thinks — and gives away a genuinely reusable animation technique to do it.
- 1.4k stars, MIT licensed
- transparent HEVC character animation
- per-character Claude/Codex/Copilot/Gemini sessions
- four themes
- Sparkle auto-update
Verified 2026-08-15. HTTP 200. https://lilagents.xyz/ and https://github.com/ryanstephen/lil-agents (both fetched)
