What GEIST is
What problem does GEIST solve?
When you hand work to an AI coding agent, you lose the thread. The agent is thinking, or waiting on your answer, or it failed four minutes ago and you have not noticed. The only way to find out is to go and look.
GEIST puts that state where you already are — on your desktop, as a small animated pet that reacts. Running, waiting, reviewing, failed, idle. You glance, and you know.
How does it work?
GEIST is a tiny macOS menu-bar app. From its menu you click Install for each agent you use — Codex, Cursor, Claude Code — and it adds a small local hook that posts activity to a loopback address on your own Mac. Your code and prompts never leave the machine.
It sits idle until an agent is active, so it costs you effectively nothing to leave running.
What is a Pet?
A Pet is the character that does the reacting — a small sprite with a state for each thing an agent can be doing. You can set one default, give each agent its own, or adopt one somebody else made.
Pets are the thing this community is built around. Members hatch new ones and publish them to the catalogue, where anyone can adopt them by link. Browse the catalogue →
Who is it for?
People who build with coding agents and mostly build alone — the kind of work where nobody else sees the run that failed at 1am. GEIST makes that work visible to you, and then gives it somewhere to go: a feed of what people actually shipped, a weekly Challenge, and a Desk of your own that says what you make.
Who makes it?
GEIST is built by a very small team, largely by AI agents working to written engineering standards that live in the open beside the code. Every decision that shaped the product is recorded as an architectural decision record, and every interface is verified in a real browser before it ships.
That is not a gimmick — it is the same bet the product makes. Agents do more of the work than people expect, and the interesting problem is seeing what they are doing.
What does it cost?
Nothing. GEIST is free, runs locally on macOS (Apple Silicon), and needs no account to use the app itself. An account only matters if you want to publish a Pet or join the community.