petdex has 3,686 stars and a live submission queue of hand-drawn…
petdex has 3,686 stars and a live submission queue of hand-drawn sprite pets — including a steady stream of Chinese submissions and an IP-holder takedown request — but every one of those pets can only be seen inside a coding-agent terminal. The 桌宠 audience it borrows from has had nothing new since Shimeji.
What is the idea?
petdex is a public gallery of animated pixel pets for Codex, Claude Code, OpenCode and Gemini CLI: submit a spritesheet, it becomes a creature that lives in a developer's terminal. The submission pipeline, moderation queue and IP fight are all real and running.
Who would use it, and what do they get?
Non-developer user: a parent, or the Shimeji audience that has been on abandonware for a decade. Finished thing: their own drawing, animated, living on their desktop and exportable as stickers.
Why would anyone bother?
The desktop-companion tradition (Shimeji, 桌宠) kept a large non-technical audience for a decade on abandoned freeware. Nobody has shipped a modern one, and now a child's drawing can become the sprite.
What is missing today?
Only geeks can see it. The capability, the art pipeline and the audience all exist, but they are in three different places: the pets live in a terminal, the people who want a companion on screen are on ordinary Windows and macOS desktops, and the newest thing — turning one hand-drawn picture into a full animated spritesheet — is not wired to either.
What makes this one different?
Take the pipeline, drop the terminal, and make the input a drawing rather than a spritesheet. One photo of a child's drawing in, an animated companion out, living on Windows and macOS and reacting to what is actually on screen — head down while you type, looks up when a video starts. Sell it as a keepsake, not a utility: the creature your kid drew, alive on your desktop, exportable as a sticker pack. Cold start (Chinese): 小红书 and B站 搜「桌宠 自制」 and the Shimeji tutorial comment sections, which are full of people who gave up halfway; Cold start (English): r/Shimeji and r/desktops.
What is the sharpest thing about it?
The drawing-to-animated-companion pipeline has quietly been proven by strangers doing it for free — what is missing is the window it lives in.
What could kill it?
Desktop pets have been free for fifteen years, so charging for one is unproven and the ceiling may simply be zero. It is also novelty with a short half-life: the joke fades, whoever owns the desktop can ship their own, and petdex's own tracker shows the real cost of a user-submitted gallery — issue #651 is a rights-holder demanding two pets be withdrawn, which is the first of many.
Who pays, and for what?
A parent, or anyone who wants company on the screen — a one-off purchase per creature, priced like a print, not a subscription.
What is the main risk?
There is no verified first-hand complaint here yet, only behaviour: people submitting art. If the desktop-pet audience turns out to be nostalgic rather than paying, the whole thing is a charming zero.
What did real people actually say?
Verbatim from the public sources linked above, not paraphrased: “这两个条目属于同一公开品牌 IP 的历史提交，当前不再属于授权发布集” — github-issue
How much work is it?
about two weeks of work
Where does the evidence come from?
https://github.com/crafter-station/petdex https://github.com/crafter-station/petdex/issues/651 https://github.com/crafter-station/petdex/issues/655
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