Case study
Petdex: from a one-day build to a dependency of Hermes Agent
Petdex is an open gallery of animated pets for coding agents. I created it and remain its main contributor.
4,261
GitHub stars
78,180
npm downloads
5,087
pets in the catalog
96.7%
of Crafter Station's Q2 star growth
Figures checked on October 20, 2026.
Idea
Coding agents had no personality layer.
Codex, Claude Code and Gemini CLI all run in a terminal for hours. I wanted a small animated companion that sits next to the agent, and a shared place where anyone could publish one.
Build
Idea to live product in one day.
The first day shipped the gallery, a CLI (npx petdex install <slug>), sign in with OAuth and PKCE, R2 storage and an agent skill so agents could install pets themselves. That day brought 1,797 visitors and 46 community pets.
Design
A public manifest instead of a closed app.
Every pet is described in one public manifest. Agents and other tools can read it without asking for permission, which is what later made the integrations possible.
Distribution
Other projects started depending on it.
Hermes Agent by Nous Research reads the Petdex manifest directly in its pet code path. Decrypt covered it and cited Petdex as the source of more than 3,200 sprites. A desktop app followed for macOS, Windows and Linux.