// the take
A PySide6 desktop pet: an animated, always-on-top cat you can drag around, with reminders, Ollama-based chat, and an AI image pipeline to generate custom cat skins from your own photos. Aimed at anyone who wants a cute, low-friction desktop companion rather than developers looking for a library or framework.
Packaging is unusually thorough for a toy project — prebuilt binaries for Windows/macOS/Linux, Homebrew cask, snap, Docker with per-OS compose files, and a pip install, all kept in sync via GitHub Actions. The custom-char pipeline (txt2img/img2img through OpenAI or a self-hosted Stable Diffusion/ComfyUI server) is designed with actual privacy awareness — reference photos are resized in memory and never written to disk. The chat feature routes through local Ollama with no account or API key, so the core 'talk to the cat' experience doesn't depend on a third party. Test coverage is broad relative to the feature surface (persistence, i18n, secret storage, activity tracking, char engine all have dedicated test files).
Scope has crept well past 'desktop pet': it now bundles an activity/keystroke tracker, GitHub notifications, calendar/ICS, and two different LLM integration paths, which is a lot of attack surface and long-term maintenance for a single maintainer. The activity tracker counts global key presses and clicks system-wide — even with no key logging, a background process hooking global input is the kind of thing that gets flagged by AV/EDR and raises trust questions for an unsigned downloaded .exe. Secret storage (OpenAI/GitHub keys) is a hand-rolled secret_store.py with no documentation of how it's encrypted or protected at rest. Desktop transparency on X11 depends on a running compositor, with a fallback to window-clipping — fine for a toy, but a reminder this isn't a polished cross-platform UI layer so much as Qt doing its best on three very different windowing systems.
We read the README, the directory tree and a key source file in October 2026. Nobody pays to be listed. How we judge →