Barnaby

Barnaby is a pixel-art desktop companion built for developers. Dressed as an old British gentleman with a top hat and a glowing monocle, he lives right on your Windows desktop and helps you make sense of your code. We have all had that moment—usually late at night after lectures—where you open a codebase you didn't write, or one an AI agent just tore through, and you have no idea where to start. Digging through files alone takes forever, and constantly copying snippets into a browser tab to ask a chatbot breaks your flow (and eats up precious RAM when your laptop is already wheezing). With Barnaby, you just ask about your project directly. You can type your question or hold a key to speak out loud. He reads through the repository himself, replies in a proper British voice, and walks you through the logic step by step. During a guided tour, a companion VS Code extension automatically opens the right files and highlights the exact lines while he explains them. He also calls out locations naturally in speech, like saying, "Look at lines 12 to 20 of login dot ts." If you prefer not to have your editor touched while you work, a simple toggle turns off auto-navigation so he only tells you where to look. He also keeps an eye on your coding agents so you don't have to babysit the terminal. Using Claude Code hooks and MCP tools, Barnaby lets you know the second an agent finishes a task, gets blocked, or needs your approval. Because a desktop pet shouldn't feel like a sterile dev tool, we gave him plenty of character. Grab him with your cursor and he panics; drop him and he falls, bounces, and lands in a heap. When he gives you a code tour, he actually turns his back to you and points right at the lines on your screen. Privacy and resource usage were huge priorities—especially since this was built on an aging student laptop that cannot handle heavy background bloat. Almost everything runs locally. Only two things ever leave your machine: your question (paired only with the specific code needed to answer it) going to Meta's Model API, and brief voice recordings going to Meta's transcription endpoint. Nothing outside the project folder you choose is ever read or sent, and your API key stays locked in Windows Credential Manager. Barnaby is built with Tauri 2 (Rust and TypeScript), a local server on 127.0.0.1 with token checks, a custom VS Code extension, and local Phonon text-to-speech.