The electronic pet from the leaked source code is now live: Claude Code April Fools' activation /buddy, no quota used.

According to 1M AI News monitoring, Claude Code engineer Thariq Shihipar shared a screenshot of the /buddy command on X, showing an ASCII snail named Huskle, along with five RPG attribute values: DEBUGGING, PATIENCE, CHAOS, WISDOM, and SNARK. The interface prompt reads “it’ll chime in as you code” (it will butt in when you write code), and it clearly labels “your buddy won’t count toward your usage” (pet interactions don’t count toward usage). Users can get its take by calling its name, “/buddy pet” to pet it, and “/buddy off” to turn it off.

This feature was already spotted by the community in the v2.1.88 source code leaked yesterday. Multiple analysis repos point out that the buddy/companion.ts in the source implements a full electronic pet system: 18 species across 5 rarities (common 60%, rare 10%, epic 4%, legendary 1%). Species are assigned to users by user ID using a deterministic algorithm (the same user always gets the same snail). It also includes a shiny variant (1% probability; shiny legendary probability is only one in ten thousand), 6 eye types, and 8 hat decoration styles. The source’s time-gating shows that April 1–7 is a “preview window,” and it goes live officially in May. Anthropic obviously plans to roll it out as an April Fools’ Day surprise, but the source leak spoiled the delight early.