My AI agent now has a face! 🤖 Idle. Working. Needs a decision. Done. It’s a Waveshare ESP32 on my desk. I pointed Copilot CLI at a photo of the device and ended up with blink, look-around, tap, sleep, and hook-driven states. Also created a web-based "character studio" so... I wasn’t flashing firmware after every animation tweak. Full walkthrough of the process in the video! 🎥 Repo:show more

Hypothetically for when you're on the road your Agent Companion could be inside VSCode as a super-personalised (and still event-reactive) vscode-pet style animation.

Yeah - that'd be a cool tweak. It's all C++ so guessing it'd just be a matter of making some type of desktop wrapper feature based on OS. If you get a chance, add any thoughts around that as an issue in the repo. Be good to capture that.

This is the summary of the prototype. The character rig was repacked from the ESP32 repo into a portable pack, and the extension replays it in a webview driven by agent lifecycle hooks over a local socket.

That seems like a super portable approach. Can't say I've tried that, but if it's working that's a good start. 😀

That was the approach I took. Must be cross-platform. Windows obviously the outlier. Will attempt cross-platform builds today. But it is working in Windows really well. Permission granted to piggy-back of the character rig for the VSCode Agent Companion target?

To clarify, does this only run in VSCode then or can it be positioned anywhere on the screen (or on a separate monitor)? To go this route I think we'll want something that can be launched independently and work anywhere. That might be what you have in mind but wanted to double-check.

Currently it is inside VSCode only. Moveable and resizable to wherever you want. But not hoverable/overlay. It is essentialy a VSCode Extension.

Thanks for the info. I'm wondering what it would take to make it completely standalone? That way if someone is using Copilot app, Copilot CLI (or another agent down the road) it would work whether they're inside VS code or not. That's more how I was envisioning that type of scenario.

The hook-driven states are such a nice touch—makes the little guy feel surprisingly alive.

It's fun to give it a little personality. 😀

@JamesMontemagno Nice work on the character. Love it!

@JamesMontemagno Thanks - been a fun project

pointing Copilot at a photo to generate blink and look-around states is how you turn hardware into an active agent.