🏰 Age of Agents

Watch your AI coding sessions grow a peaceful pixel-art realm.

Every Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode or Koda session becomes a settler walking out of the keep. The tool it runs decides which workshop it visits, subagents become workers, and tokens fill the storehouse — a calm, Age-of-Empires-style kingdom of your work. No combat, just a quiet realm you can watch at a glance.

▶ Live site · Quick start · How it works · Architecture

✨ What is this?

Age of Agents (npm package age-of-agents) runs as a small local web app alongside your normal CLI workflow. It watches your agent session transcripts and renders them as a calm, real-time strategy realm:

• Each session → a settler. Start a Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode or Koda session and a settler walks out of the keep, carrying your prompt as its task.
• Tools → workshops. The settler heads to the building that matches the work — the forge for code edits, the mage tower for web research, the mine for the terminal.
• Subagents → workers. When a session spawns subagents (e.g. the Task tool), they appear as little workers around their settler.
• Tokens → harvest. Tokens read and produced fill the storehouse. Settlers ponder while thinking, rest when waiting, and stroll home when the day's work is done.
• Two worlds. Switch between a fantasy (top-down) and a sci-fi (isometric) realm on the fly.
• Many projects → cities. Each project becomes a city you can switch between; open one for an optional peek at Beads tasks and a Graphify code map (see Project intel).

A glanceable, second-monitor view of what your agents are quietly up to.

🖼️ Gallery

Session detail — click a settler to inspect its task, token economy and live activity:

🚀 Quick start

Install — npm i -g. Install it globally for the short aoa command; update with npm update -g age-of-agents when new versions ship:

npm i -g age-of-agents
aoa            # watches ~/.claude, ~/.codex, ~/.opencode & ~/.koda sessions (+ Claude in local Docker), prints the URL
aoa --demo     # calm demo mode (fake sessions)
aoa --open     # also open the browser

The server binds to 127.0.0.1 only and never writes your transcripts anywhere — it just reads them locally and broadcasts game state over a local WebSocket. See Privacy.

From source

git clone https://github.com/agentsmill/age-of-agents
cd age-of-agents && npm install
npm run demo     # server (demo) + client (Vite) → http://localhost:5173
npm run dev      # visualize your real sessions

For focused local testing you can limit which session sources are watched:

AOA_SOURCES=codex npm run dev
AOA_SOURCES=claude,codex npm run dev
AOA_CODEX_LOOKBACK_DAYS=3 npm run dev

AOA_SOURCES accepts claude, codex, opencode, and koda. Codex watches recent date folders by default instead of the entire historical ~/.codex/sessions tree.

🧭 How it works

agent session transcript ──▶ server (watcher + state machine) ──▶ WebSocket ──▶ client (PixiJS realm + HUD)

• The server tails JSONL transcripts, turns each line into a Fact, and runs a small per-session state machine (thinking / working / resting / idle / returning).
• It broadcasts a HeroSnapshot for every session over a WebSocket. The snapshot carries what the session is doing (currentTool, recent actions, tokens) — never raw coordinates.
• The client decides where each settler goes and renders the pixel-art realm, the HUD, the minimap and the side panel.
• Running agents in Docker? Local containers are auto-discovered (zero-config) and their Claude sessions read straight out of the container via docker exec — no image changes, no host bind-mounts required. Containerized settlers carry a 🐳 badge in the side panel. Disable with AGENTCRAFT_DOCKER=0.

🏛️ Project intel (optional)

Run several projects at once and each becomes its own city in the top bar — switch between them, or pick All to see every settler together. A city shows how many agents are active and which kind (Claude, Codex, OpenCode, Koda).

Select a city to open the Architect's Hall, a side panel that surfaces two optional, third-party signals about that project — read-only and entirely opt-in:

• 📜 Beads — open tasks from Beads, an AI-native issue tracker that lives in your repo. Age of Agents reads .beads/issues.jsonl (falling back to bd list --json). Turn it on in a project with bd init.
• 🌳 Graph — a code knowledge graph: symbol, edge and community counts plus the most-connected "god-nodes". Age of Agents reads graphify-out/graph.json. Generate it with the bundled, dependency-free generator — run npm run graphify in a project (or node scripts/graphify.mjs <dir>) to scan relative imports and write graphify-out/graph.json. You can also use the external Graphify tool; the schema is the same.

Neither tool is bundled or required. If a project has no .beads/ or graphify-out/, the panel just reads "not initialized"; it polls every few seconds, so intel appears as soon as the files do.

🎨 Themes

Two full art sets, switchable from the top bar:

• Fantasy — top-down: keep, mage tower, library, guild, market, mine, orchard & ponds.
• Sci-Fi — isometric: command center, hangars, drone factory, ore refinery, research lab on a calm Martian colony.

🧱 Architecture

A small npm-workspaces monorepo, published as the single age-of-agents CLI:

npm test      # unit tests (server + client)
npm run build # production client + bundled CLI (dist/cli.js)

🔒 Privacy

• The server listens on 127.0.0.1 only — nothing is exposed to your network.
• Transcripts are read locally and read-only; their contents are never written to disk by Age of Agents or sent anywhere.
• Installing the optional Claude Code hooks modifies ~/.claude/settings.json (a fast event channel). Demo mode touches nothing of yours.
• Optional interactive mode (off by default). You can let the panel answer Claude Code permission prompts and plan approvals via the local hooks. It stays 127.0.0.1-only; with the mode off, Age of Agents remains a passive read-only observer. When on, an unanswered prompt (timeout or app closed) always falls back to the terminal — the app never auto-allows. "Always allow" rules live in ~/.age-of-agents/permission-policy.json; the app never edits the permission rules in ~/.claude/settings.json.
• Optional: launch agents from the app (BETA — setup guide). With the Claude Agent SDK installed (npm i @anthropic-ai/claude-agent-sdk), a 🚀 Launch agent button lets you start a Claude Code session from the panel — pick a folder, type a prompt, choose a permission mode. These app-owned sessions are real Claude Code runs (they use your account and tokens) and you answer their permission prompts, plan approvals and multiple-choice questions (a centered "agent question" modal) directly in the panel. The SDK is an optional dependency; without it the button is hidden and nothing changes.
  • Auth for launching: the Agent SDK authenticates from environment variables only — it does not read your interactive Claude Code login. To use your subscription, generate a long-lived token once with claude setup-token, then start the app from a shell where CLAUDE_CODE_OAUTH_TOKEN is set (and ANTHROPIC_API_KEY is unset, or it takes precedence). Without it, launches fail with 401 Invalid authentication credentials; the launch dialog warns when no auth is present.

🎭 Assets

All pixel-art assets in packages/client/public/assets/ were generated by the author with PixelLab and are the author's own work — released here under the same MIT license as the code. Without any assets the game still runs on procedurally generated placeholders.

assets-manifest.json + scripts/download-assets.mjs are an optional helper for swapping in alternative third-party packs locally; those packs are never committed (some forbid redistribution) and are not needed to run the game.

🤝 Contributing

Issues and PRs are welcome. To get going: npm install, then npm run demo to see the realm, and npm test before opening a PR.

📜 License

MIT © Mateusz Pawelczuk. Art assets generated with PixelLab, redistributed under MIT per PixelLab's Terms of Service.

🙏 Acknowledgements

Inspired by