Gumpbox 1.11: Meet the Companion Fairy

Alongside Browser Use, Gumpbox 1.11 ships something sillier: a small 3D bunny who lives on your desktop, watches your AI agents work, and reacts to everything they do. She has opinions about your deploys. She naps when nothing happens. You can click her.

We call her the Companion Fairy. Yes, she is a bunny. We'll get to that.

What she does

She floats in her own always-on-top, fully transparent window — no panel chrome, no background, just the bunny. She stays on screen even with Gumpbox's main window closed, and you can drag her anywhere on any display.

Her behavior maps to what your agents are actually doing:

• Approval waiting? She zips in circles with an exclamation badge — your cue that an agent needs a decision.
• Tool calls running? She glows, one ear twitching, paws kneading.
• Something succeeded? A full hop-and-spin celebration.
• Everything quiet for ten minutes? She curls up and dozes off.

Click her once and she takes you to the action — the active terminal session, or the live agent browser session. When both are running she offers a chooser. When nothing is running she shows a status card with session counts and what ran last.

She also talks. Every minute or so while idle she floats a speech bubble with one of 500+ handcrafted one-liners — devops care, security mindfulness, server wisdom, encouragement — and she acts out the theme: happy jumps for encouragement, waves for sass, stretches for wisdom, a maneki-neko beckon for teamwork.

A minimal control strip under her chin performs tricks on demand — wave, smile, happy, inviting, or roll the dice for a random one. Right-click hides her or toggles the sound she makes when an approval lands.

Three decisions worth explaining

Her own window, not an in-app overlay. The obvious implementation is a view inside the app window. We shipped a standalone floating window instead, because the whole point is ambient awareness: she should be visible while you're in your editor, not only while Gumpbox is frontmost. Closing the main window doesn't dismiss her; only hiding her (or quitting) does. She politely steps away while the app is locked.

Minimal controls, maximum mascot. An earlier draft had a gallery window with eight labeled buttons. It buried her. The shipped design is one small icon pill on her own window — the trick set stays reachable through a dice button, and she remains the thing you actually look at.

macOS first. Everything above ships on Mac today. iPhone and iPad users: she's watching you too, from the future — we haven't figured out the right idiom for a floating pet on iOS yet, and we'd rather ship nothing than ship a bad drawer.

She used to be a fairy. Then a cat.

Honest changelog: v1 shipped as a glowing orb ("Navi-style fairy"). It was fine, but it read as a special effect, not a companion. Rework number two was a chibi cat — expressive ears, good whiskers, wrong somehow. Third pass landed on a bunny, and suddenly the ears could do the acting: alert ears shoot upright, busy ears twitch asymmetrically, sleeping ears droop flat. Long ears turned out to be the expressiveness engine the whole design was missing.

The code still calls her a fairy. Settings say "Companion Fairy." Consider it her legal name.

There's also real engineering under the fluff: a SceneKit scene rendered fully transparent in light and dark mode (which fought us every step — appearance switches love to repaint window backgrounds), native window dragging that tracks the cursor 1:1, and a window-manager exemption so Gumpbox's own single-window police doesn't assassinate her.

What's still rough

• The name. See above.
• The trick set is small — eight behaviors. More are coming, including reactions to specific MCP tools.
• If you park her at the very top of a screen, the speech bubble skips a round rather than clip.

Availability

The Companion Fairy is part of Gumpbox 1.11 — free, on by default, one toggle away in the app menu, Settings, or her right-click menu. She works with every tier on Mac.

Tell us what she should say next on Discord — the message library is designed to grow.

Download Gumpbox on the App Store