Puck for macOS

Language: English (here) · 한국어

This is the macOS repo — new home for what used to live at Speaki-e/puck (now archived).

Platforms: macOS (here) · Windows · Linux

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A macOS desktop pet that is also an AI agent. Two Swift apps:

• Puck — the pet: an always-on-top character that walks your screen, points at things, listens for voice, reads and types into other apps, and drives the Mac (run_shell, run_applescript, click/find UI elements, launch apps).
• PuckClient — its window: chat, workspaces, git status, a native SwiftUI code editor, and a terminal pane.

Conversations are kept between launches. The agent can hold shells open that outlive the call that started them — a dev server, a watcher — and can be given something to run on a schedule ("every morning, check CI"), which runs while Puck is up.

While a turn runs you can watch its plan tick itself off, and anything you type waits for it to finish rather than interrupting it. @ names a file out of the project so neither of you has to guess which one. A tool you are tired of approving can be allowed for good in that workspace, and taken back in settings. The agent reads the project's own AGENTS.md (or CLAUDE.md) before it works.

When it is done, the run says how many files it changed and opens the diff on exactly those; ⇧⌘R asks the same question about the whole project. Either way a file can be put back the way it was.

The two talk over a local socket bridge. The agent core (chat, tools, approvals, sessions) lives in pet-app/Puck/Agent.

That is the island: a panel across the top of the chat window, filled with a picture. Open the window and the pet walks over and climbs into it; close the window and it goes home to the desktop. Drop your own Tank/seabed.png in and the island is filled with that instead.

Install

Download Puck-<version>.dmg from Releases and drag Puck into Applications. macOS 14 or newer. The chat window rides inside the app and comes up with it; there is nothing else to move.

The image is signed ad-hoc rather than with a Developer ID, so the first launch is refused as coming from an unidentified developer: right-click the app → Open → Open. Puck then asks for Accessibility, and for the microphone, speech recognition and screen recording as you use the features that need them.

Nothing updates itself. Once a day Puck asks GitHub whether a newer release has been published and the pet says so if there is one; the version and the link stay in Settings → General, and the dragging is still yours. Switch the check off in the same place.

Build

sh pet-app/scripts/install.sh   # builds + signs both apps into /Applications

Needs Xcode, xcodegen, and an Apple Development certificate (a free personal team is fine — a stable signature is what keeps the Accessibility grant alive across rebuilds).

Test

sh pet-app/scripts/test.sh   # PuckTests + a PuckClient build

Unattended, exits nonzero on any failure. Tests needing something this machine may lack (node, a claude/codex CLI) skip rather than fail.

Agent providers

Normal chat talks to the Anthropic or OpenAI API directly. The code_editor tool instead runs a vendored ACP agent under node, which needs its vendor's CLI (claude or codex) installed. Credentials go in Puck's .env: ANTHROPIC_API_KEY / CLAUDE_CODE_OAUTH_TOKEN, or CODEX_API_KEY / OPENAI_API_KEY.

Making it your own

Everything you can swap lives in one folder:

~/Library/Application Support/Puck/
    Avatars/<name>/     one folder per character
    Tank/seabed.png     the picture the island is filled with

Right-click Puck's menu bar icon for the quick panel — the toys, mute and volume, how big the pet is, which way the theme goes — and 설정 in it opens the settings window: one page each for the avatar, its poses, sound, movement and the rest. (A left-click on the same icon opens the chat window instead.)

The window's 아바타 page has a button that opens the folder above (커스터마이징 폴더 열기), and creates it if it is not there yet.

The tank

Drop a seabed.png into Tank/ and it replaces the one the app ships. It is read once at launch, so restart the pet after changing it. It is scaled to the island's height with the sides cropped, and repeated end to end if the window is wider than one copy — so a wide, shallow picture (the bundled one is 3596×447) fits without repeating on most windows.

A character

An avatar is a folder with a manifest.json and one PNG per clip beside it:

Avatars/my-pet/
    manifest.json
    idle.png  walk.png  fall.png  …
    sounds/*.wav

Adding one, start to finish

1. Open the folder. 설정 → 아바타 → 커스터마이징 폴더 열기. It creates Avatars/ and Tank/ if they are not there yet, so this also tells you the folder exists.

2. Make a folder for your character inside Avatars/. Its name is the name the picker shows: Avatars/my-pet/ appears as my-pet.

3. Drop in one PNG and a manifest.json. One drawing is a working character — idle is the only clip that has to exist and every other state falls back to it, so you can start with a single picture and add walking, climbing and the rest whenever you feel like it. Transparent background, drawn facing right (the pet is mirrored when it walks the other way). The smallest manifest that works:

   {
     "schema_version": 1,
     "name": "my-pet",
     "type": "sprites",
     "hitbox": { "width": 130, "height": 133 },
     "clips": { "idle": "idle" }
   }

   hitbox is your drawing's proportions, not its size: every avatar stands the same height whatever numbers it declares, and only the ratio between these two is read. Match your drawing's aspect ratio or it will look squashed. How big the pet actually stands is the size slider in the quick panel.

4. Load it. 설정 → 아바타 → 아바타 다시 불러오기, then press 선택 next to its name. No restart: the reload button rebuilds the running pet from what is on disk, which is also how you see a redrawn sprite or an edited manifest without quitting.

If something is wrong with the package the pet does not change and the reason is in the log (~/Library/Application Support/Puck/logs/) — a missing idle file, a manifest that will not parse, or a schema_version this build does not know. The import button (아바타 패키지 가져오기…) takes a folder like the above and copies it in for you, and it checks the package before it does, so it is the louder way to find out what is missing.

manifest.json, with the fields that matter:

{
  "schema_version": 1,
  "name": "my-pet",
  "type": "sprites",
  "scale": 1.0,
  "bounce_intensity": 0.6,
  "hitbox": { "width": 130, "height": 133 },
  "clips":    { "idle": "idle", "walk": "walk" },
  "emotions": { "happy": "beaming" },
  "sounds":   { "land": "sounds/waah.wav" }
}

• clips maps a state to a file stem: "idle": "starry-eyed" draws starry-eyed.png. idle is the only one required — everything else falls back to it, so a single drawing is a working character. The rest are walk, climb, fall, land, point, type, listen, react_click, react_drag, kick, pet and spin.
• emotions are swapped in when the agent reacts (happy, thinking, sad, angry, love, wink, laugh, cry, …), same file-stem rule.
• sounds are paths inside the package, and may sit in a subfolder. Keys are clip names plus a few events: app_launch, task_success, task_fail, listen_start, kick_<toy>, chatter_*.
• hitbox is the character's shape — the ratio of its width to its height, which is what the pet is clicked, stood and thrown by once it has been drawn at the app's own standard height. bounce_intensity (0–1) is how much the squash-and-stretch shows on a still drawing.
• type must be sprites. It is the only kind this build can draw; a package declaring anything else is refused by name rather than loaded and drawn as nothing.
• Only schema_version, name, type, hitbox and clips have to be there. scale defaults to 1, sounds and emotions to nothing at all, and bounce_intensity to the app's own default.
• Paths in the manifest stay inside the package: a name that climbs out of it is refused rather than read.

Two things on those pages are worth knowing about before you hand-edit anything. The 아바타 page has a base-image slot, which sets idle from one picture you pick — and since every other clip falls back to idle, that alone is a complete character. The 자세 미리보기 page draws what the pet will look like walking, climbing each wall and crossing the ceiling in each direction, with a flip and a quarter turn per pose: that is the way to fix artwork that climbs head-first without redrawing it.

pet-app/Puck/Resources/Avatars/dummy is a complete example, and the import button takes a folder like the above and copies it in for you.

Community

Questions, bug reports, feature ideas, or just want to show off your custom avatar — join us on Discord.

Want to help? CONTRIBUTING.md says how to build it, where the easy issues are, and what a good pull request looks like here.

License

MIT for the source — see LICENSE. Not for the artwork, icons, fonts or audio distributed next to it: see LICENSE-ASSETS.md for why.