GitHub - TevvvB/termagitchi: A creature for every git worktree, living in your coding agent's status line. Deterministic species, rarity bands, and one view across every live session.
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A creature for every git worktree, living in your coding agent's status line. Deterministic species, rarity bands, and one view across every live session. - TevvvB/termagitchi

This started as a joke and turned into something I actually use.

I work across a lot of git worktrees at once, and every terminal looked identical. I kept typing into the wrong one.

So now each session hatches an ASCII creature into the status line. It’s derived by hashing the session id, so nothing is chosen and nothing is persisted anywhere - delete the cache and the same session draws the same creature. Some species are rarer than others and a few are shiny, which was a mistake, because I now open extra worktrees hoping for a good roll.

The face also tracks how tidy the worktree is: uncommitted files, unpushed commits, how far behind trunk you are. A small animal looking miserable about your working tree turns out to be more persuasive than any pre-commit hook I’ve installed.

Single static Go binary, no runtime dependencies. The status line executes once a second in every open session, so that path reads two small cache files and never shells out to git - the expensive work happens in a throttled background probe.

Mine, so take the enthusiasm with salt.

  • tevvvb@programming.devOPEnglish
    2·
    7 hours ago

    Update: it’s TermaGITchi now.

    Two people in this thread got there independently, so the credit is split. @gankouskhan@bookwyr.me landed on TomaGITchi first, and it’s still the highest-voted comment here by a distance. @MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip then arrived at TermaGITchi on their own, and that’s the one I took - same joke, a good deal further from a trademark that still has lawyers, and it reads better out loud.

    parallel-harness-pets described the mechanism. “Parallel harness” was always my jargon rather than anybody else’s; yours describes what the thing actually feels like to use.

    Nothing breaks. The old link redirects, the command is still pets, and Homebrew migrates existing installs on its own.

    https://github.com/TevvvB/termagitchi

    While I’m here: @Sidhean@piefed.social wrote the best description of it that exists, mine included - “a clever way of incentivising your own good behavior”. I built the mood tracking to tell worktrees apart, and only noticed afterwards that I’d started pushing branches so a small ASCII animal would cheer up.

  • Sidhean@piefed.socialEnglish
    2·
    6 days ago

    Now THIS is a coding assisstant! I love them! Its such a clever way of incentivising your own good behavior!

  • crimsonpoodle@pawb.social
    81·
    11 days ago

    It is good that this gives you some happiness; my joy for such things has significantly declined. Making the agent hellscape cutsey seems fruitless and somewhat macabre to me.

    • tevvvb@programming.devOP
      2·
      10 days ago

      fair comment! I personally saw this as a tool to encourage parallel development via harnesses (which I’ve been loving at my work recently).