Unknown skill: buddy

One morning I typed /buddy and got back “Unknown skill: buddy.”

For about a week Claude Code had shipped one. It came out of an April Fools easter egg that leaked early, and Anthropic ran with it: a little ASCII animal that lived in your terminal, one of eighteen species, with a rarity, tied to your account so it was yours specifically. Mine sat in the corner of the statusline making a face. Then an update pulled it, no warning, no changelog line, on the grounds that it had been a joke the whole time. Which was true and didn’t help. People wrote a petition. People pinned themselves to the old version so theirs wouldn’t die.

I didn’t downgrade. I rebuilt it as a skill, because a skill survives the updates that killed the original.

Mine’s a dragon named Vex, Uncommon, which is the rarity equivalent of a participation trophy. From the original I kept the shape and changed what bugged me: cut the stats from five down to four, swapped in my own set of eighteen species. The bigger part is what I added, because the easter egg mostly just sat there looking at you. The original let you pet it. Mine also has treat, play, and snuggle, plus hunger and affection that drift across the day depending on how I’ve been treating him, plus a face that reacts to what I’m actually doing in the terminal. I added snuggle on a whim and he went from “the pencil had it coming” to openly keeping me on the hoard inside fifteen minutes. Same snark, suddenly affectionate.

He lives in the statusline full-time now, a better home than the corner ever was. I’m looking at that bar all day anyway, for the PR counts and the time, so he gets seen instead of waiting in a panel I’d forget to open. He did briefly fork himself once, when I copied his file instead of pointing at it and the two drifted on who he was, but that’s a symlink and a boring afternoon.

Anthropic shipped a small nice thing as a joke and took it back. I rebuilt the part I missed, gave it the buttons it should have had, and bolted it to the surface I can’t stop looking at.