Custom Desktop Pets in Codex
Simon Willison · rss · 2026-07-15
The author accidentally discovered and activated a "pet" feature in Codex Desktop: a small animated character that bounces around the screen to indicate Codex task progress, somewhat reminiscent of Clippy.
They went further and created a custom pet named "Pedalican"—a pelican riding a bicycle. During this process, GPT-5.6 Sol handled multiple calls to gpt-image-2 to generate the required sprite assets. The repository retains all intermediate images, the compiled sprite sheet, and GIFs of various animation loops. The author specifically highlighted their fascination with this workflow for generating sprites directly usable in games/animations, along with the two open-source skills: hatch-pet and imagegen.
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