The electronic pet from the leaked source code is now live: Claude Code April Fools' activation /buddy, no quota used.

CoinWorld News: According to monitoring by 1M AI News, Claude Code engineer Thariq Shihipar shared a screenshot of the /buddy command on X, showing an ASCII snail named Huskle, along with five RPG attribute values: DEBUGGING, PATIENCE, CHAOS, WISDOM, and SNARK. The interface prompt says “it’ll chime in as you code” (“it will chime in as you code”), and it explicitly notes “your buddy won’t count toward your usage” (pet interactions don’t count toward usage). Users can get its thoughts by calling the pet’s name, run “/buddy pet” to pet it, and “/buddy off” to turn it off. This feature was already discovered by the community in the v2.1.88 source code that leaked yesterday. Multiple analysis repositories point out that the buddy/companion.ts implementation in the source code includes a complete virtual pet system: 18 species across 5 rarity tiers (common 60%, rare 10%, epic 4%, legendary 1%). Species are assigned by user ID via a deterministic algorithm (the same user always gets the same pet), plus a shiny variant (1% probability; shiny legendary probability is only 1 in 10,000), 6 eye types, and 8 hat decoration styles. The time gating in the source code shows that April 1–7 is the “preview window,” with official rollout in May. Anthropic clearly plans to release it as an April Fools’ Day surprise, but the source code leak spoiled the fun early.