ruPet is a desktop robot pet for ChatGPT and Codex, with an optional Ruflo-aware skill

What this is about

Some desktop versions of ChatGPT and Codex can show a small animated pet on screen. ruPet is one: a round charcoal robot with cyan eyes and a small ru emblem that blinks, waves, jumps and follows your pointer.

It is deliberately simple. The pet package contains a metadata file and a sprite sheet. The README is explicit that selecting it does not enable tools, load instructions or start an agent.

What changed

Two releases landed on September 22:

• v1.0.0: the pet in the desktop v2 format. A 1536 by 2288 pixel transparent WebP atlas, 8 columns by 11 rows, covering idle, running, waving, jumping, failed, waiting, working, review and sixteen look directions.
• v1.1.0 (commit ec273799): an optional $rupet skill plus separate assistant and creation prompts. The skill discovers which tools are available and can use Ruflo memory and routing when present; missing Ruflo tools do not block it. The artwork is unchanged.
• Downloads: ruPet.zip, ruPet-skill.zip and a SHA256SUMS.txt file for both.

Get started

Prerequisites: a desktop app version that supports custom v2 pets. There is no npm package, CLI or MCP server; installation is copying files.

• Download ruPet.zip from the latest release and extract it.
• Put pet.json and spritesheet.webp directly in ~/.codex/pets/rupet/ (Windows: %USERPROFILE%\.codex\pets\rupet\). Use <CODEX_HOME>/pets/rupet/ if you set CODEX_HOME.
• In the app, open Settings, Pets, select Refresh, then choose ruPet.
• Enter /pet to show it. Enter it again to hide it.

pets/
  rupet/
    pet.json
    spritesheet.webp

Optional skill: copy the whole skills/rupet folder, including its references and agents subfolders, to ~/.codex/skills/rupet/, reload skills, then invoke $rupet in a chat. This is a local skill folder, not an npx skills package.

Commands here were read from the release notes and repository documentation at the pinned reference; they were not executed as part of writing this article.

ruPet is a community-created pet and is not an official OpenAI product. Pet availability depends on your app version and workspace settings.

Use it today

Practical case: you want a visible, low-stakes signal of what your assistant is doing. Input is the pet package. The workflow is the install above. Output is an on-screen robot whose waiting, working and review animations match what the app reports.

Reader acceptance test: after refresh, ruPet appears in the pet list and /pet toggles it. If it does not appear, the README's first check is that the two files sit directly in pets/rupet/ and not in a nested folder.

Push it further

Experimental commentary. The split is the interesting design decision: the look is shipped as inert artwork, and any capability is a separate, opt-in skill that says which tools it would use. That keeps a fun download from quietly becoming an agent.

Limitation: the skill's usefulness depends entirely on which tools your environment already has; without Ruflo it is ordinary guidance. Falsifiable test: install only the pet, not the skill, and confirm no new tools or instructions appear in a chat. If anything does, the separation the README describes is not holding.