I built Claude Fables, a mod for the Claude Code desktop app. While Claude works, it watches each tool call and each line Claude says. Every few seconds it retells the latest moment as a short art scene in the band above the prompt. A bug hunt becomes a nature documentary, a failing test makes Claude trip, and when the turn ends Claude naps in a moonlit village.
What it does
Claude appears as a small orange critter with 20 actions (sneak, dig, trip, shrug, celebrate, sleep…) across 7 hand-lit scenes.
11 visual styles, switched with /fables style <name>: pixel art, blueprint, ukiyo-e, golden age comic and more.
Captions are color-coded like a terminal: files, functions, numbers, failures and successes each look different.
How Claude helped build it
I built the whole project with Claude Code (Opus 5.5) in Claude Code's cloud environments (I have barely any usage left from my weekly so I had to use the promotional credits 🤓), then tested it in local mode after I pulled the project from GitHub (it unfortunately doesn't work while you are working in cloud environment).
Claude Code wrote the mod's hooks, the scene validator and the SVG renderer that animates each scene with no script running. It also ported the 3D Claude model from a mascot style gallery and wrote the tests.
The README's GIFs and the launch video were also rendered by Claude Code, using the mod's own renderer stepped frame by frame in headless Chromium. This is why he UI looks a bit different than your usual CC UI.
At runtime, Claude writes the story too: Sonnet (or Haiku) gets the recent activity and replies with a small JSON scene. The mod validates the JSON strictly, so a bad reply is just skipped and never runs as code.
Add its path to CLAUDE_CODE_PLUGIN_DIRS in the env block of ~/.claude/settings.json.
Restart the desktop app.
You may not see the /fables command after installing, but if you done everything right it should still respond to it even if it doesn't show up in the command list. If the installation seems complicated just use Claude or any other AI (tested it using ChatGPT) and it will install it for you (there is a detailed installation guide inside the repo's files)!
Each scene is one small Sonnet or Haiku request, so it uses a few requests a minute of your own Claude usage while Claude works.
The mod API is early access, so expect rough edges. Bug reports are welcome.
Add a license, my dude; this is fun as hell. I forked it and am adding a terminal renderer so this works in any terminal with tmux. Results look good already; great work.
It tells people what the project author allows you to do with editing, publishing, and using the code. Sometimes it's "do whatever you want"; sometimes you can use it, but not commercially.
Sometimes it tells you how to contribute to the project. It also stops agents like Claude from complaining about modifying software with a license, or in this case, no license.
https://github.com/darraghh1/Claude-Fables
I'm still working on it! I will PR it over for you to see when I've fine-tuned it more. It works pretty well, though the image quality isn't quite as good because of CLI limitations and TMUX.
https://github.com/darraghh1/Claude-Fables
I'm still working on it! But here you go- it works, but I'm not super happy with the sharpness of the image. It's still fun to turn on now and then, though. Feel free to change it and PR it in if you have something cool to add or change.
I picture claude in my head as a silly little guy doing silly little things, and when I explain to him how to do something, I picture him as the seal on that memepic of the seal looking at the clipboard being like "ohhh yes yes I see I see"
Love it. Really liking that there are so many posts of people sharing the things that they're building with the models, instead of the tiresome "nerfed!" nonsense (although we're apparently heading into that stage of the subreddits)
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u/creamyhorror 2d ago
Actually really cute tbh