chat-pet-sprite-creation

chat-pet-sprite-creation is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from microsoft/vscode. It costs 53 tokens per session (4,631 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide for creating and changing the small animated pet images used in VS Code chat. It covers sprite sheets, which are image files containing multiple animation frames, along with eyes, states, and transitions.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to create pet states, animations, eye treatments, Stable and Insiders variants, and transitions. It also helps update the related images, CSS, runtime behavior, and tests.
Why use it?
It helps new artwork remain visually consistent with the existing character and behave correctly in the chat interface. It also identifies the current code, dimensions, timing, and tests that control the result.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/microsoft/vscode/chat-pet-sprite-creation
Any agent
npx skills add microsoft/vscode --skill chat-pet-sprite-creation
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/microsoft/vscode

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for chat-pet-sprite-creation

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/microsoft/vscode/chat-pet-sprite-creation.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/microsoft/vscode/chat-pet-sprite-creation)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/microsoft/vscode/chat-pet-sprite-creation"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/microsoft/vscode/chat-pet-sprite-creation.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 53 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 4,631 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00053 $0.04631
Opus 5 $0.00026 $0.02315
Sonnet 5 $0.00011 $0.00926
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00463

Measured 4d ago against content hash 6a446a77b9c6, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

chat-pet-sprite-creation scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 4d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

.github/skills/chat-pet-sprite-creation/SKILL.md · 385 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 385 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Chat Pet Sprite Creation

Create pet sprites that feel like one continuous character rather than separate drawings. Start from the current pet body, preserve its visual anchor, and make every difference intentional.

Source of truth

  • Sprite art: src/vs/workbench/contrib/chat/browser/widget/media/chatPet/
  • Runtime states, dimensions, timing, and transitions: src/vs/workbench/contrib/chat/browser/widget/chatPetWidget.ts
  • Eye geometry, facing, clipping, and motion CSS: src/vs/workbench/contrib/chat/browser/widget/media/chatPet.css
  • Unit tests: src/vs/workbench/contrib/chat/test/browser/widget/chatPetWidget.test.ts

Read the current implementation before drawing. Existing dimensions and timings may have changed since this skill was written.

PR precedence and lineage

This skill distills the complete pet PR history. When rules conflict, use this precedence:

  1. Current code and tests
  2. The newest relevant open PR
  3. Newer merged PRs
  4. Older historical behavior

In particular, animation cleanup PR #330399 supersedes the old revive-sign flow and several earlier sprite/timing assumptions.

PR Durable learning
#327063 The pet is one semantic button; sprite canvases, images, eyes, and effects are visual-only and aria-hidden. Resolve asset URLs through FileAccess.
#327412 Model reactions as explicit states. Do not immediately repeat ordinary random reactions; sample rare transformations separately.
#327588 Double-buffer sprite images and swap only after the pending image loads. Never blank the active sprite while a new source is loading.
#327696 Stable/Insiders is a typed, persisted appearance choice. Keep variant naming and geometry systematic.
#327714 Animated art is a horizontal sprite sheet plus a deliberate static reduced-motion PNG. Timing is runtime data, not image metadata.
#328334 Persistent behavior such as “on the run” belongs in service state. Multi-phase animations advance from completion signals, not guessed delays.
#328480 A drag release must not also trigger a click reaction. Gestures that share pointer events need explicit suppression/ownership.
#328530 Waking consumes the interaction that woke the pet; it must not also trigger a random reaction. Reduced motion may skip the wake transition.
#329121 Coalesce gaze updates, pause sprite timers while the document is hidden, and resume from elapsed time rather than replaying missed frames.
#329347 Keep pixel-art pose changes in sprite frames and spatial motion in layout/CSS/physics. Complete falls from transition signals.
#329729 Face the interaction before starting a reaction. Give each transient state an explicit lifetime and use real completion events for chained phases.
#329852 Pointer and keyboard gestures need equivalent outcomes. Reduced motion preserves the state change while removing the travel animation.
#329867 Attention animations are bounded; clapping stops after the confirmation-attention window even if the confirmation remains pending.
#330160 Eyes are a composited runtime layer with tracking/blinking modes. Rapid facing changes can trigger a separate dizzy state. Wide art must respect live bounds.
#330275 Physics uses the body footprint, bounded frame steps, and explicit impact moments. Recompute geometry when layout changes during flight.
#330399 Latest animation contract: wide sleep/wake art, frame-aware blink composition, fixed-orientation decorations, and reverse despawn → forward respawn using one effect sheet.

Read the full file on GitHub · 385 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 4d ago First seen · 385 lines · 53 tokens per session scan A 6a446a77b9c6

Subscribe to this mod's changes

chat-pet-sprite-creation is a skill published in the GitHub repository microsoft/vscode (190,808 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 53 tokens to every session and 4,631 once invoked, about $0.0003 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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