Katachi 形
- Year
- 2026
- Medium
- Animated SVG, JavaScript
- Form
- Desktop buddy that reacts to the lifecycle of a Claude Code session
Select a lifecycle state
search, idle, bash, thinking, typing. One buddy, one stage.Background
At the end of 2025, I had decided that in 2026 I was going to immerse myself in the world of Agentic AI. Soon thereafter, in the late winter nights of January, I began to feel ✦ senza bussola (SEN-tsah BOO-soh-lah) — Without a compass — navigating a situation with no instrument of orientation. I would go through these very clear conversations with an agent, only to end up sitting around waiting for it to respond while it was off working on something.
But what was it working on, exactly? What was it doing? I didn't really understand.
So one evening, I thought, "I should have a desktop buddy that animates the various states of an agent's lifecycle. That should be totally doable..." — and so the Katachi 形 (form/shape) project emerged.
Eventually Katachi could take any form. But because I kept seeing a little unicode avatar pop up every time I started a Claude Code session, I thought that would make a natural first form. But I had to give him a name... so I called him "Claudito".
Above are five states of Claudito!
Process
Over several months the animations evolved in complexity as I learned new techniques and developed compositional ideas and themes I wanted to produce.
The typing state alone went through thirty-six versions, from an ASCII sketch to tentacles that type Asimov's Three Laws on a real key map.