The feature is officially called Pets 🐶 — a live animated companion for OpenAI Codex (OpenAI's agentic IDE for autonomous software development).
In practice, it's a floating animated avatar that lives on your desktop above all other windows. Its behavior reflects Codex's current status: while you're working in other apps, a quick glance at the corner of the screen tells you whether the model is still running, waiting for your input to review something, or crashed with an error.
How to create your own
There are 8 default options, but since we're talking AI — you're better off vibecoding your own. Install the skill:
`$skill-installer hatch-pet`
Reload skills in the menu (Force Reload Skills), then prompt it to generate your own unique helper. For example, based on your recent projects:
`$hatch-pet create a new pet inspired by my recent projects.`
Gameified development, basically. Pick your Pokémon 👀