lil agents for Windows

Tiny AI companions that live on your Windows taskbar.

Bruce and Jazz walk back and forth along your taskbar. Click one to open an AI terminal. They walk, they think, they vibe.

Supports Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, GitHub Copilot, Google Gemini, OpenCode and OpenClaw — switch between them from the tray icon.

A Windows port of ryanstephen/lil-agents, rewritten in C# / WPF. See NOTICE for attribution.

features

• Animated characters rendered from per-frame alpha sprites
• Click a character to chat with AI in a themed popover terminal
• Switch between six providers from the tray menu
• Four visual themes: Peach, Midnight, Cloud, Moss
• Slash commands: /clear, /copy, /help in the chat input
• Copy last response and new-session buttons in the title bar
• Thinking bubbles with playful phrases while your agent works
• Sound effects on completion
• First-run onboarding
• Multi-monitor and per-monitor DPI aware

requirements

• Windows 10 (1809+) or Windows 11

• x64 or arm64 — a separate build is published for each

• No .NET install needed: the published exe is self-contained

• At least one supported CLI:

  Provider	Install
  Claude Code	irm https://claude.ai/install.ps1 | iex
  OpenAI Codex	npm install -g @openai/codex
  GitHub Copilot	npm install -g @github/copilot
  Google Gemini	npm install -g @google/gemini-cli
  OpenCode	npm install -g opencode-ai
  OpenClaw	npm install -g openclaw, then set the gateway under Provider → Advanced Settings

Installed a CLI while the app was running? Tray → Provider → Rescan for CLIs.

getting the exe

Download from Releases — LilAgents-win-x64.exe for a normal PC, LilAgents-win-arm64.exe for Windows on ARM (Snapdragon X, Surface Pro X, or a Windows VM on an Apple Silicon Mac). No installer, no .NET, nothing to unzip: it is a single self-contained exe.

Every push to main also builds, but those land as CI artifacts, which need a GitHub login and expire after 90 days. Tagged builds are what get promoted to a Release.

Windows will show a SmartScreen warning the first time, because the exe is unsigned: click More info → Run anyway. First launch is a second or so slow while the runtime unpacks itself to a temp directory; later launches are not.

building

dotnet build LilAgents.sln -c Release
dotnet test  tests/LilAgents.Tests/LilAgents.Tests.csproj

Producing the single-file exe:

dotnet publish src/LilAgents/LilAgents.csproj -c Release -r win-x64 --self-contained true `
  -p:PublishSingleFile=true -p:EnableCompressionInSingleFile=true `
  -p:IncludeNativeLibrariesForSelfExtract=true -p:DebugType=none -o publish/win-x64

Requires the .NET 8 SDK on Windows. WPF cannot be compiled on macOS or Linux.

how it differs from the macOS original

The Swift app is ~4,300 lines against AppKit, AVFoundation and CoreVideo, none of which exist here, so this is a rewrite against the same design rather than a translation. The behavioural differences worth knowing:

	macOS	Windows
Walk surface	Dock icon strip, computed from com.apple.dock	Taskbar band from SHAppBarMessage; Win11 centre-alignment respected
Animation	Transparent HEVC via AVPlayerLayer	241 alpha PNG frames per character, decoded on demand
Click-through	Screen-captures a 1×1 rect to sample alpha	Reads sprite alpha directly in WM_NCHITTEST
CLI discovery	zsh -l -i -c env	PATH ∪ registry ∪ known install dirs; npm .cmd shims decoded to node <script>
Auto-update	Sparkle	not implemented

There is no Dock-width equivalent on Windows — no API reports how wide the taskbar's button cluster is — so the walk band is a fraction of the monitor width, centred on Windows 11 and left-anchored elsewhere. See TaskbarGeometry.ComputeBand.

privacy

Same posture as upstream. lil agents runs entirely on your PC and sends no personal data anywhere.

• Your data stays local. The app plays bundled animations and reads your taskbar geometry to position the characters. No project data, file paths, or personal information is collected or transmitted.
• AI providers. Conversations are handled entirely by the CLI process you choose, running locally. lil agents does not intercept, store, or transmit your chat content. Anything sent to the provider is governed by their terms and privacy policies.
• OpenClaw is the exception by design: it talks to whatever gateway you configure. Its token is stored in %APPDATA%\lil-agents\settings.json in plain text.
• No accounts, no analytics, no update pings.

license

MIT. See LICENSE.