Dippy stands on your desktop and watches every Claude Code window you’ve switched on. When a permission prompt appears, he waits a beat, dips, taps , and goes back to swaying. When Claude needs a real decision — or finishes the job — he calls you with a bird call and his halo turns amber.
Then you click the window’s name, and it comes to you.
Minimized mode
Press – and the balloon and the body go away. What’s left is a fifty-six pixel bird’s head sitting on your wallpaper — hat, beak, and for the first time both eyes. In profile he only ever shows you one.
He is not paused. He is still watching every window you armed, still dipping, still tapping Return. You just can’t see the rest of him do it. And his eyes shut every time his beak goes down, the way they always have.
A bird that small is easy to lose in the corner of a big display, so the alert had to be the whole animal, not a dot you go looking for: the halo behind him lights amber the moment a window needs you. Nothing else on this page is allowed to use that colour.
And nothing can bury him. Dippy is always the top layer — he floats above every window on the machine, over a full-screen editor, over a stack of terminals, over whatever you opened on top of him a minute ago. Park him where you like. He is still there when you look up.
Click him to bring him back.
To scale
Every figure on this page is blown up so you can watch him work — which leaves one honest question open: how much of my screen is this bird going to take? So here he is to scale, on a fourteen-inch MacBook. Everything on the screen — menu bar, terminal, Dock, bird — is drawn at one reduction. The proportion you see is the proportion you get.
Balloon open, he parks in a corner — that’s mission control, and it rolls up. Rolled, he’s a desk toy standing on the wallpaper. Minimized, he’s fifty-six pixels — and still watching every window you armed.
He’s live — that terminal is Claude at work, and when a permission prompt lands, watch him answer it. Drag him anywhere on the screen; every button on his balloon presses. On Windows he is the same bird at the same sizes, standing over the taskbar instead of the Dock.
The amber dot
Every window he’s watching gets a dot and its own name, stacked right under him. The dot is that window’s switch, and the colour tells you what he’s doing with it. Amber means stop what you’re doing, this one needs you.
Click the name next to it and that terminal tab comes to the front — up out of the Dock, out from under a dozen other windows, straight to you. You never go hunting through a window list again, and the amber clears itself the moment you look.
Try it: the amber window below is minimized. Click its name.
Zero setup
You don’t add anything. Dippy finds every Claude Code session running on your machine by himself and draws a dot and a name for each one, taking the name from the session itself. Open a new window and it appears under him within five seconds — switched off, waiting for you.
All you ever do is click the dot. Every window boots off, and off is all the way off: a grey window gets no taps, no bird call, and no amber, ever.
Each click on a dot steps it one notch calmer, then off. The setting you launch him with is a ceiling — no click can go hotter than it, so a bird started in blue can never reach red.
He calls you
A notification chime is a small hostile event. A bird call is not. Dippy’s four voices are modelled on the pitch and rhythm of real birds — three flycatchers and a night parrot — and then resynthesised from scratch, note by note. Nothing was sampled, so nothing is licensed. He calls once when a window starts waiting on you, and once when a task is finished. Never while it’s just running.
And they’re tuned for the dog. The first version sat at 2–4 kHz — squeaky-toy range — and the author’s dog spent an afternoon hunting the room for it. These sit low, and start slow.
Click one to hear it. The speaker button on his balloon steps through them — rusty, social, golden, parrot, mute — and plays each one as you land on it, so you hear what you picked.
The part that matters
Something that presses Enter on your behalf has to be honest about what it will and won’t press, and it has to be a thing you can read. Here is the whole of it.
Before he touches a key, a separate program answers exactly one question —
can this be undone? — from a default-deny list with 102 attack cases in
its own self-test. It never decides what to do about the answer. Dippy does. They are
different files on purpose, and gate.py is the one you should read first.
Press Enter on the same prompt three times yourself and he’ll take it from then
on. Whole-input match, always: approving rm -rf node_modules fifty times
teaches him nothing whatsoever about rm -rf state/. Secrets, force-pushes
and resets can never be learned at any count.
No network calls, no telemetry, no account. He reads the prompts Claude Code hands him and writes to a folder next to himself. Unplug the internet and he doesn’t notice — there is nothing out there he wants.
You know the one. Night shift, nuclear plant, doing a man’s job. We gave him a new one.
Requires Claude Code, on macOS (Terminal.app) or Windows (Windows Terminal). Dippy presses Return on permission prompts in the windows you switch on; you remain the operator of your own machine and are responsible for what runs on it. He is not rated for the console of a nuclear power plant; if you leave him in charge of one anyway, that is between you and your supervisor. The drinking bird is a heat engine, patented in 1946 and long since in the public domain; this one is a computer program and does not drink. Bird calls are synthesised from scratch — no recordings were sampled. Not affiliated with, endorsed by, or licensed from any television programme, animated or otherwise. Prices in U.S. dollars. Fourteen-day money-back guarantee — refunds, terms of sale and privacy all live in the fine print, which was written to be read. Questions before you buy? support@thedippybird.com — a person answers. Void where prohibited.