GEIST Platform — v0.1.0

First public release · June 2026

Meet the home for your coding companion. GEIST is where the little Spirit that lives in your menu bar — Pix — comes online for the rest of the community: a calm, warm place to hatch a pet, share what you ship, and find the people building alongside you. No leaderboards. No streaks. No scores. Just care.

This is our first version. Everything below is live today. It's early, it's quiet on purpose, and it's the foundation we'll grow from.

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✨ The big idea

Your agents already do the work — Codex, Claude Code, Cursor, and friends. Pix is the companion that gives that work a heartbeat: a soft pixel Spirit whose mango heart pulses with what your agent is doing right now — across eight states: idle, working, waiting on you, in review, waving, jumping, shipped, or failed.

GEIST Platform is the community around Pix. The desktop app is where your pet lives; this is where it gets a home page, makes friends, and shows what you've built — without ever turning building into a competition.

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🥚 Hatch your companion

• Hatch a pet before you even install. Name your companion, pick a skin from a live pixel-preview gallery, and tap Open in GEIST to carry that identity straight into the desktop app. No account required to start.
• Upload your own pets. Bring a sprite sheet from any agent, give it a name, a short description, and up to three tags. Pets start as a private draft — publish when you're ready.
• One-tap "Open in GEIST" everywhere. Every pet, recipe, and share surface has an adopt button that hands the companion to your desktop app, with a clean package download as a fallback if the app isn't installed yet.
• Each pet gets a home — a detail page with a live animated sprite preview, its install count, who made it, and a friendly discussion thread.

🪴 The Desk — your living /@handle

• Your public profile is a living Desk, not a static bio. It leads with your most-hatched companion and a soft warmth state (buzzing, cozy, resting) drawn from your recent activity.
• A Ship Moments strip shows what you've recently shipped (and the brave fails), pulled in from the desktop app.
• Set your display name, handle, bio, avatar, and links (website, GitHub, X). Want to stay low-key? Toggle unlisted to stay link-reachable but off the members directory.

🤝 Find your people

• Members directory — browse the community, with an editorial rail for featured makers. Follow and unfollow with one tap (a calm, public, GitHub-style graph — no follower scoreboard).
• Crews & Chapters — create or join a small belonging group (capped small on purpose). Each crew has an unranked wall: member desks in arrival order and a quiet grid of the crew's recent Ship Moments. Tag your crew with a real-world chapter (Bangkok, Singapore, Tokyo, SF, NYC, London, Berlin, Bangalore, or Remote).
• Cross-Pet Cheer — send durable warmth to a friend's pet. It shows up as a soft glow tier, never a raw number you could sort by. Warmth, not a like count.

🍳 Recipes & The Lab

• Pet-Stamped Recipes — share the build behind a setup (tools, MCP servers, config references — never secrets), stamped with your pet and your handle. Anyone can adopt a recipe with one tap and start from where you left off.
• Remix Lineage Tree — every recipe shows its full family tree as an interactive flow: where it came from, and everything remixed from it. Fork from any point in the lineage.
• The Lab — a discovery board for recipes you can filter by affinity (the tools and MCP servers a build uses), topped with a curated editorial shelf. Counts are shown, but it's discovery by what you use — never a ranking.

🎁 Seasons & Drop Day

• Seasonal skin drops — time-boxed windows where curated skins are free to claim. After a season closes, those skins become collectible only by gift or swap. There's no money anywhere in the system — only collect, claim, gift, and swap.
• Drop Day — a recurring, chapter-run daytime ritual tied to each drop. RSVP to a warm, unranked wall ("I'm in — hatching from Bangkok 🌱"), preview the skins dropping that day, and follow the run-of-show.

📸 Share what you ship

• Ship Moments — when your agent ships (or bravely fails), the desktop app can capture the moment and host it at a shareable link, in three framings:
  • Sticker — a chat-native, animated die-cut.
  • Polaroid — a framed keepsake.
  • Stat card — a humble "ship receipt."
• Every share surface carries rich social preview images, an Open in GEIST button, and a backlink to your Desk — so a shared win is also a quiet invitation.

📨 Stay in the loop (gently)

• Notifications — a real-time inbox for follows, favorites, comments, and pets hatched from yours. The bell updates live; rows mark themselves read as you go.
• Saved — a private shelf of the pets you've hearted.
• The Feed — the newest published pets, featured makers, and recently joined members in one calm stream.
• Quiet-Win Digest — opt in to a once-a-week recap of your small wins, in-app and emailable, with a shareable card. A quiet week reads as cozy, never as a zero on a scoreboard.

🔎 Search everything

• A ⌘K command palette searches pets, members, and seasons across the whole platform — with typed shortcuts (@handle jumps to a profile), recent items, and quick actions. A centered dialog on desktop, a bottom sheet on mobile.

🛡️ Safe & welcoming by default

• Comments carry light rate-limiting and soft-delete moderation.
• Reports flow to an admin moderation console that surfaces the most-reported items first, with a careful two-step remove.
• Privacy is built into the data layer (row-level security): drafts stay private, you only ever edit your own things, and share links are unguessable — never enumerable.

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🎨 Look & feel

GEIST is airy-first and light by default. The whole interface is built to recede so your content and your pet are the heroes.

• Palette — White and Sky carry ~90% of every surface; Mango #FF7A33 is the one accent, reserved for what's active (a single call-to-action, focus rings, the online dot, and Pix's heart). A rare touch of Sunshine for play.
• Type — Figtree throughout, with Geist Mono for code and IDs.
• Built on seven design principles — Clarity, Deference, Depth, Consistency, Feedback, Accessibility, and Harmony — with WCAG AA contrast, full keyboard navigation, and prefers-reduced-motion respected everywhere.

The character is Pix — a soft-ghost Spirit with a wavy hem and a mango heart-core that pulses through eight agent states. One house silhouette, infinite skins.

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🧱 Under the hood

Passwordless sign-in (magic link / OAuth), a full-text + fuzzy search layer, recursive lineage trees in Postgres, and real-time notifications all ship in this release. AI features route through OpenRouter as the standard provider — the groundwork is in place, with LLM-powered surfaces to come.

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🧭 What's next

The bones are here; the next chapters fill them in:

• The Earn bridge — connecting what you do to what you collect (non-cash — rarity earned by building, never bought).
• Richer Desk identity — badges, lead-pet selection, and a markdown bio.
• Living-pet growth surfaces — bringing more of the desktop companion's life onto the web.
• AI-assisted discovery — once the OpenRouter groundwork meets a real surface.

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🙏 Thank you

This first version is built around one belief: building software should feel like care, not competition. No streaks to break, no leaderboards to climb — just a companion, a community, and the quiet joy of shipping.

Welcome to GEIST. 🌱

Hatch your companion → /hatch