ClaudeBuddy

Clawd is a small Mac desktop companion: a pixel-art crab that walks back and forth along the bottom of your screen and is also a chat interface to Claude, the AI assistant from Anthropic. You click the crab to open a small chat panel and type into it. The README is clear that this runs against your existing Claude Pro or Max subscription via the Claude Agent SDK, with no separate API key and no per-token billing.

Clawd can do more than chat. It can look at your screen on request (which triggers a macOS Screen Recording permission prompt that you have to grant once), control Spotify if you connect it through a standard OAuth flow, react when you switch apps, and take a nap if you ignore it for about three minutes, complete with sleepy z characters floating up. Example prompts include what time is it, what app am I in, read my chrome tab, what is playing, pause, skip, or play hello by adele. Mundane questions just stream back without any tool use.

Installation is one curl command piped into bash. The installer checks your machine, downloads the source, builds the app locally, signs it with a self-signed certificate, and copies it into /Applications. The first launch is blocked by macOS Gatekeeper because the project does not have a paid Apple Developer ID, so you right-click and pick Open once to trust it, and after that Spotlight and Launchpad work normally. Updates run the same installer again.

Requirements are macOS (best tested on Apple Silicon), Node.js 20 or newer to build, a Claude Pro or Max subscription, and Claude Code installed with claude login already run so the credentials file at ~/.claude/.credentials.json exists. Spotify is optional. A menubar item lets you reset the conversation, change the crab's size, switch monitors, connect or disconnect Spotify, and toggle launch at login. Developers can clone the repo and use npm scripts to run it as an Electron app in dev mode.