[HN Gopher] Show HN: Open-Source Animal Crossing-Style UI for Cl...
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Show HN: Open-Source Animal Crossing-Style UI for Claude Code
Agents
We posted here on Monday and got some great feedback. We've
implemented a few of the most requested updates: - iMessage
channel support (agents can text people and you can text agents)
Other channels are simple to extend. - A built-in browser (agents
can navigate and interact with websites) - Scheduling (run tasks on
a timer / cron/ in the future) - Built in tunneling so that the
agents can share local stuff with you over the internet - More
robust MCP and Skills support so anyone can extend it - Auto
approval for agent requests If you didn't see the original:
Outworked is a desktop app where Claude Code agents work as a small
"team." You give it a goal, and an orchestrator breaks it into
tasks and assigns them across agents. Agents can run in parallel,
talk to each other, write code, and now also browse the web and
send messages. It runs locally and plugs into your existing Claude
Code setup. Would love to hear what we should build next. Thanks
again!
Author : ZeidJ
Score : 42 points
Date : 2026-03-27 17:25 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| billconan wrote:
| does it use the claude code api or the claude code cli? You know,
| the claude code api is more expensive.
|
| I also hope it can have a webapp version, rather than electron.
| because most of our work are on a remote server.
| ZeidJ wrote:
| It actually uses the Claude code SDK so it plugs into whatever
| you already have.
|
| It can use API/CLI or even if you have a private hosted
| instance.
|
| We're actually working on a remote web app version but its a
| little trickier to wire up.
|
| These are great questions - thank you!
| linsys wrote:
| If it uses the SDK then it's token burn? Or can it "legally"
| use your Claude.ai MAX account, your subscription account?
| ZeidJ wrote:
| Great question - we're going to look into this in-depth.
| techgnosis wrote:
| Not allowed? This is easy to find in the Agent SDK docs
|
| "Unless previously approved, Anthropic does not allow
| third party developers to offer claude.ai login or rate
| limits for their products, including agents built on the
| Claude Agent SDK. Please use the API key authentication
| methods described in this document instead."
|
| https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/agent-sdk/overview
| gwilkes wrote:
| Right, pretty sure people got their accounts shut down
| for doing this kinda thing in the early days of OpenClaw
| before it was renamed and when it supported login. I
| guess you can take your chances but API is probably the
| only safe way to use this.
| ZeidJ wrote:
| We saw this, but thought it was for Agents calling the
| API directly. Outworked is just a wrapper around your CLI
| using the existing agents and sub-agents in your Claude
| Code installation.
|
| It's a great point though and we'll need to read into
| this more in-depth. Appreciate you raising this.
| jameschaearley wrote:
| Love the pixel office. Such a fun way to make multi-agent work
| less abstract. Being able to actually watch agents walk to their
| desks and pick up tasks makes it way easier to follow what's
| happening than staring at terminal logs. Curious if the
| orchestrator handles cases where two agents need to edit the same
| file.
| ZeidJ wrote:
| Thank you James, great question! Generally, when the
| orchestrator assigns parallel work it does it in groups, with
| everyone in the group working on different files. When the
| group is done it passes the work to the next group which can
| then edit those same files.
|
| We're working on simultaneous editing of the same files using
| git, but we want to ensure changes are merged in an intelligent
| way.
| mitul005 wrote:
| iMessage is the one that changes the category for me. "Agents
| that can text real people" is a different thing than a multi-
| agent demo. I've been hacking on something similar and the
| hardest problem wasn't orchestration it was figuring out when to
| bother a human vs. just deciding. How does auto-approval work, is
| it all-or-nothing or per task?
| ZeidJ wrote:
| There are two levels of auto approve, first level is auto-edit
| which is basic read and write, and basic bash tools (these can
| be configured to be any arbitrary bash command).
|
| The second level is called auto approve and is for more complex
| bash commands. Generally the model will ask permission before
| running one of these big commands, but you can allow all. Right
| now, it's global across the instance, but we're working on
| making it more granular.
|
| Also, there is a deny list of certain commands which you can
| customize to prevent bad behavior (like rm -rf, etc...)
|
| We want to wire the approval process to imessage or whatever
| channel, but we need to first auth the imessage session to make
| sure it's coming through from the owner and not someone else
| communicating through the same channel.
| hamuraijack wrote:
| "animal crossing-style" is a bit of a stretch
| ZeidJ wrote:
| yeah.. maybe should have said "inspired by"
| odst wrote:
| Not even. Maybe briefly saw an advertisement, but didn't
| click it.
| ZeidJ wrote:
| tbh just looked at the cover you know?
| smileybarry wrote:
| Yeah, I was expecting something like the Animal Crossing dialog
| bubble or something. At least put Tom Nook as the boss
| character.
| ZeidJ wrote:
| This is such a good idea. A nondescript non-copyright
| infringing raccoon character as "The boss" would be perfect.
| james-clef wrote:
| Maybe a bit of an odd one, but can you decorate the office? I'm
| wondering like have you abstracted the decor elements into
| something that is straightforward to extend? How easily could I
| give my office a new espresso machine or something?
| ZeidJ wrote:
| This is a fun question. The answer is yes, you can redecorate
| and move things around.
|
| Right now it's all built in phaser, and furniture is pretty
| straight forward to build and deploy. But it requires modifying
| the source. We want to add support for easy drop in decoration
| in future updates.
| Contrails wrote:
| Haha this is really cool! I imagine it would be a nice tool to
| teach kids about working with agents.
| ZeidJ wrote:
| This is a really neat idea, we hadn't thought about the
| education angle. Thanks for sharing!
| Ryand1234 wrote:
| this seems interesting. Will give it a spin this weekend.
| ZeidJ wrote:
| Thank you - let us know if you have any feedback. Appreciate
| you trying it out.
| Finnoid wrote:
| Love this! AI agents can be so abstract to many people and this
| project really makes it feel much more approachable. Makes me
| think of Game Dev Story! Would be awesome to see little thinking
| bubbles over them to show what they are doing. Ultimately I see
| promise in making it easier to visually see what is happening in
| the system.
| ZeidJ wrote:
| Completely agree, we found it helped explaining it to our non-
| technical friends as well.
|
| We do have thinking bubbles but they only show up based on the
| task the agent is doing. Perhaps we'll add a toggle or
| something to give people the option to have them always on.
| xybernetex wrote:
| As a visual-oriented person I can completly agree. Being able
| to visualze makes things make so much more sense.
| robonot wrote:
| The parallel agent coordination is what makes this interesting.
| Most agent wrappers are just single-agent loops with extra steps.
| ZeidJ wrote:
| Yes, we actually added it because we were getting impatient
| with how long some implementations were taking. Appreciate this
| comment - thank you!
| Skidaddle wrote:
| I like the visualization, but in terms of orchestration, how does
| it compare to CC's built in agent swarms?
| ZeidJ wrote:
| Great question! It actually takes advantage of the sub-agent
| swarms since it is directly connected to your Claude Code
| instance.
|
| We want to implement agent teams as well, but it is still an
| experimental Claude Code feature. So it's more of a secondary
| priority right now.
| braden-lk wrote:
| Sorry, but there's not even a single hint of a visual
| relationship to Animal Crossing here. I believe this title is
| inaccurate.
| sjdrc wrote:
| Are you planning a Linux release?
| ZeidJ wrote:
| In theory it should build in Linux (electron) but we haven't
| tested it yet. Things like the imessage integration wouldn't
| work. Thanks for asking!
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