Most developer tools get built out of necessity. Something breaks, or something is too expensive, or something does not exist yet and you need it to. This one got built because it sounded fun. GitHub Tamagotchi hatches a virtual pet from your repository and ties its mood to your actual GitHub activity. It is, on paper, completely unnecessary. In practice, making a game out of repo health turns out to be surprisingly motivating.
The idea started as a joke during a weekend hack session. What if your repository had feelings? What if ignoring your open issues made something sad? It turns out that when you give abstract metrics a face, you start caring about them in a way that a dashboard full of numbers never quite achieves.
How it works
You connect a GitHub repository, and a pet hatches from an egg. The pet's mood and evolution stage are tied to real metrics: commit frequency, pull request throughput, issue resolution time, and how long things have been sitting idle. Neglect a repo for a while and your pet gets visibly lonely. Ship consistently and close your issues, and it thrives. It is genuinely useful as a lightweight health indicator. A glance at your pet tells you more about your repo's pulse than most status pages.
The evolution system
Pets progress through lifecycle stages: egg, baby, juvenile, teen, and adult. The stages loosely map to project maturity. A brand new repository gets a freshly hatched creature still figuring out the world. A mature, actively maintained project with a healthy contributor base gets something more impressive. The transitions happen naturally as your repository accumulates activity over time.
Mood indicators add another layer. Your pet can be happy, hungry, worried, or dancing, depending on recent activity patterns. A burst of merged PRs might trigger a little celebration. A pile of stale issues with no responses will make it look concerned. The moods update throughout the day, so there is always something new to check on.
MCP integration
You can check on your pet from your code editor using the Model Context Protocol. No need to open a browser or switch tabs. Ask your AI assistant how your pet is doing and it will tell you its current mood, evolution stage, and what metrics are driving the state. This is the kind of integration that feels unnecessary until you try it, and then you wonder why every dashboard does not work this way.
The leaderboard
There is a leaderboard. You can compare your repo pets with others and see whose creature is the happiest and most evolved. It adds a bit of friendly competition to open source maintenance, which is a space that could use more of that energy. It is not meant to be taken too seriously But it is hard not to feel a small pang of pride when your pet is thriving at the top of the list.
The site is live at tamagotchi.webwiebe.nl. The source is on GitHub.