Claude killed /buddy. I built a client that brings your companion back.
/buddy stopped working today in v2.1.97. No changelog, no warning. Just "Unknown skill: buddy."
Your companion data is still in ~/.claude.json though, so it's buried but not erased.
You can bring it back from the dead with an app I made called Anima, a lightweight native macOS client for Claude Code that has its own companion system. Anima reads your existing buddy data from ~/.claude.json, generates persistent ASCII familiars per-project, and the companion actually watches your sessions and reacts to what's happening.
It's a standalone Tauri v2 + Rust app (4MB binary) that pipes into your Claude Code sessions.
What it does that /buddy didn't:
Companions persist across sessions (not just the current one)
Per-project familiars (different creatures for different repos)
Companion watches your session and gives unsolicited code commentary
Nim token economy (earn tokens from usage, spend on re-rolls)
18 species with animation states
Repo: https://github.com/btangonan/anima
Built this before /buddy even launched — the source code leak in March is what showed me Anthropic was thinking along the same lines. Happy to answer questions about the architecture.
Posted Apr 10, 2026, 12:56 AM UTC