Your AI agents are a crime family
Every running Claude Code session becomes a pixel crab on the edge of your screen. One glance tells you who finished, who is stuck, and who is waiting on you.
5Wed 02:14macOS 13+ · native Swift · no Electron · no permissions · MIT
An independent community project — not affiliated with Anthropic
> refactor the billing module ✳ Thinking… (xhigh) ✓ read 14 files ✓ edited invoice.ts ▶ running tests…
> add the map layer ✓ Done in 4m 12s > ▊
? Allow rm -rf ./tmp? waiting for you…
Have you lost the dopamine from clauding?
You used to build things. Now you type a sentence, watch a spinner and read a diff. The work still ships — faster than ever — but the part that felt like something is gone.
Here comes the second stage.
Remember when writing software felt like something? Now you type a sentence, watch a spinner, and read a diff. Six terminals, six spinners, nothing to look at. The machine does the interesting part and you supervise a progress indicator.
And when one of them finally finishes, you alt-tab through five windows to find out which. By the time you do, you've forgotten what you were doing.
Claudme gives it back. Your agents stop being progress bars and become a crew: named, ranked, wearing colours you recognise, celebrating their own wins along the edge of your screen. Same output — the feeling returns. And it moves the which one needs me question out of your working memory and into your peripheral vision — the crabs live on the edges of your screen, so they never cover your work, but you always know who's busy and who's done. And it gives the whole thing a pulse again: your agents stop being spinners and start being a crew you recognise by name.
Every state means something
| What you see | What it means |
|---|---|
| Strolling slowly, small | Session is idle |
| Hurrying, full size, steam off its head | Working — steam means xhigh or max effort |
Stops, hops, ! bubble | Waiting for you — permission or input |
| Jump, confetti, “It's done, boss.” | Turn just finished |
Curled up on the bottom edge, z Z | Idle more than 10 minutes |
| ⚠️ bubble | Rate limit or API error |
| Little crabs bobbing alongside | That session's subagents |
| 🕶️ black shades | Running with --dangerously-skip-permissions |
| 🛰️ orbiting satellite | Remote or bridged session |
| 🤓 round glasses | Plan mode |
| Chewing, then a burp | Compacting its context |
| Wakes, grumbles, walks off | Asleep in one spot for a minute |
| Stretched out in a deckchair | It's Friday |
| Deckchair, grey and queasy | It's Saturday |
| Head shake, no chair | It's Monday |
| Bigger, darker crab | Bigger model |
Ranks are earned, not assigned
Every session is a made man with a stable name — the same session always gets the same crab. Rank comes from staying alive, so your longest-running agent runs the family.
Don Vito Opus └─ rank ── given name ── family Picciotto under 10 minutes Given names come from six eras: Soldato under an hour Roman · Medieval · Renaissance Capo under four hours Prohibition · Yakuza · Syndicate Don the veteran Family = the model it runs on
Unique colours
Each live crab wears a differently coloured fedora, matching its dot in the menubar. Learn them once and you never need the label.
A life of its own
They greet each other in passing, take beer breaks, clink glasses with neighbours and do a stadium wave when the last busy session finishes.
They know what day it is
Friday, an idle crab unfolds a striped deckchair on the edge and leans back. Saturday it does the same, greyer and queasier — “Never again.” Monday there is no chair, just a slow head shake.
Click to jump
Click a crab and the terminal running that session comes to the front. Right-click for its working directory and status.
As big and as fast as you like
Crab size is a percentage in the menubar, 50% to 300%, on top of the per-state and per-model scales. Speed has three settings — slow motion, normal, and the one called on something, which is how they used to move.
Your Dock stays yours
A crab loitering on the Dock scurries aside as your cursor comes down. If you would rather the icon always won the click regardless, one menubar switch makes Claudme ignore the mouse in that band entirely.
Speaks your language
Nineteen languages out of the box — English, Slovak, Czech, German, Greek, Spanish, French, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Dutch, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian, Chinese — each written in its own crime-fiction register, not translated, plus a street-talk version of every one that swears — on by default, with the strong words censored so a line on a shared screen reads without being spelled out.
Two commands
Requires macOS 13+ and Xcode command line tools. No dependencies, no package manager.
git clone https://github.com/marekadvocate/claudme.git cd claudme && ./build.sh open build/Claudme.app
Then hit Live reactions in the menubar to install the Claude Code hooks, so
crabs react the instant a turn ends. The hook is a one-line curl to
127.0.0.1 that always exits 0 — it can never block or slow down Claude
Code, and your settings.json is backed up first. Removing it is one click.
Nothing leaves your Mac
No telemetry, no accounts, no network beyond loopback. No screen recording or accessibility permissions either.
~3 MB, native
Plain Swift and AppKit. Every crab is drawn in code — there isn't a single image asset in the repo.
Every display
One overlay per monitor. Crabs are dealt across your screens and stay on their own.
Come build a crab
MIT licensed and dependency-free — ./build.sh is the entire build system,
there is no project file and no package manager. If you have Xcode command line
tools, you can build it.
Add a language
One entry in Quips.swift. Don't translate the English — write what a mobster would actually say in your language. Nineteen so far, each with a street-talk twin.
Add an idle behaviour
Copy the shape of the beer break or the balloon ride. Keep it rare — anything seen more than a few times an hour becomes noise.
Add an era
A given-name pool in Naming.swift plus headwear and shell markings in PetView.swift. Six exist; the timeline has room.
The house rules are short: no image assets (every pixel is drawn in code), never block Claude Code, and parse the session registry defensively. All of it is in CONTRIBUTING.md.
Buy me a Porsche
Claudme is free and always will be. But a man can dream, and the dream is German.
One-off tips only, no memberships. Ko-fi takes no platform cut on those.
Shipped recently
Pulled live from the repo, so this is never out of date.
- Loading…
Not an Anthropic product
Claudme is an independent, unofficial, community-built tool. It is not made, published, endorsed, sponsored or supported by Anthropic PBC, and it has no affiliation with them of any kind.
“Anthropic”, “Claude” and “Claude Code” are trademarks of Anthropic PBC. They are used here only to say truthfully which software Claudme works with — nothing more. Any resemblance in the name is unintentional and implies no connection.
Claudme reads Claude Code's local session files on your own machine. It sends nothing anywhere, is not a client for any Anthropic service, and does not use their API. Support requests belong here, never to Anthropic.