simonw/pedalican

Pedalican is a small add-on for Codex, OpenAI's coding assistant, that gives it an animated desktop pet: a pelican riding a tiny bicycle. It was built by developer Simon Willison as a fun, low-stakes project rather than a serious tool. To use it, you copy the pedalican folder from this repository into a specific spot on your computer, the pets directory inside your local Codex configuration folder. Once installed, the pet appears and animates through several states. The project relies on two existing Codex skills to work: one called hatch-pet, which handles creating and managing pets inside Codex, and one called imagegen, which handles generating images. Pedalican combines these to produce its pelican character and its various animations. The repository includes a full set of animation frames and preview images showing the pelican in different states: idle, waiting, running in multiple directions, jumping, waving, reviewing, and a failed state. These are packaged as a spritesheet along with individual animated GIFs and a contact sheet showing all the frames together. There is no setup process beyond copying files, and no code to write or run yourself. This is not a general-purpose library or application, it is a single decorative pet meant to run inside the Codex environment. The README notes that some of the run artifacts are still being finalized and validated before being packaged into the pets directory, so the setup may change slightly as that finishes. The project has no listed programming language and no stated license, so anyone wanting to reuse or redistribute it should check with the author first. More background and the story behind building it is available on the author's blog. Overall, this is a playful, personal-scale project, a novelty companion for people already using Codex, not infrastructure meant for other developers to build on.