Claude Code electronic pet /buddy was muted and removed! After the developer yelled, they intentionally “downgraded”

Has Anthropic really burned through all the community goodwill this time? Claude Code’s /buddy feature was only just fully rolled out to Pro subscribers yesterday (4/8), and today after the v2.1.97 automatic update it has completely vanished—typing the command now returns only a cold, single-line error message: “Unknown skill: buddy”.
(Background: Anthropic is exploding! Claude Code 500,000 lines of important original code leaked—competitors can reverse engineer, and a new Capybara model confirmed)
(Extra background: Anthropic subscriptions lock up the lobster OpenClaw! Going forward, third-party tools can only be paid for within the allowed amounts)

It all goes back to 2026-03-31. Because of a missed .npmignore setting, Anthropic uploaded the complete source code for Claude Code to npm (@anthropic-ai/claude-code v2.1.88), leaking a total of 512,000 lines of TypeScript code, 1,900 files, and 59.8 MB. The cybersecurity researcher Chaofan Shou was the first to dig up this batch of data, but what truly made the developer community erupt was an unexpected easter egg hidden inside it.

In the leaked code, there’s a hidden feature /buddy: an electronic pet that lives next to the terminal input box and reacts to your programming conversations—looking like a character from inside an electronic chicken (hopefully young people know what that is).

When Futurism reported on this leaked easter egg, developers’ emotions flipped within 48 hours from “Anthropic messed up again” to “holy shit, what on earth is Anthropic secretly building?”

18 species, RPG attributes, AI souls

The leaked code revealed Buddy’s full design. The 18 species can be adopted, including duck, cat, rabbit, capybara (water pig) to ghost, blob, mushroom. Rarity ranges from Common (60%) all the way to Legendary (1%), plus a 1% chance of a shiny variant. Each Buddy has 5 RPG attributes (scored from 0 to 100, including CHAOS, SNARK, etc.), and uses AI-generated individual personalities called “souls,” which will respond based on your conversations.

This doesn’t really feel like they’re building a CLI tool—more like they’re making a personable work partner with personality. The developer community sees it as Anthropic’s “soft power” differentiation against Cursor and GitHub Copilot: they’re both AI coding assistants for writing code, but only Claude Code lets you raise an electronic pet.

Starting from v2.1.89, Anthropic officially rolled out /buddy to Pro subscribers; on 4/8 it was fully opened, effectively turning the leaked easter egg into an official feature. The community hadn’t even had time to list their wishlist (customized appearances, VSCode support, cross-session memory, sub-agent buddies), and then the v2.1.97 update on 4/9 cleared everything out.

Developers collectively downgrade

After v2.1.97 was released, a GitHub petition called “Bring Back Buddy” appeared. (Issue #45596）幾小時內就湧入大量反應，同時還有 #45517 “/buddy command and companion completely missing in v2.1.97 (works in v2.1.96)” and #45525 “/buddy returns ‘Unknown skill: buddy’” and multiple other issues) all suggest that developers really need electronic pets.

Even rarer: some developers chose to manually downgrade back to v2.1.96, just to keep the Buddy they’d been raising. Someone in the community said, “This isn’t something a normal CLI tool feature would make people do.”

Within two days, third-party hack tools like claude-code-buddy-reroll and any-buddy also appeared one after another.

Because, as of the time of writing, the Claude official changelog page hasn’t mentioned this removal at all, and Anthropic has also not issued any announcement, the community’s reaction doesn’t look like typical feature complaints—it looks more like they’ve been stabbed. People directly described this update as “destroying community goodwill with zero payoff.”

The additional paid feature Claude Code added—/fast—opened up is faster than the previously available general mode (even though it hasn’t been that long). As for whether /buddy will come back as the next step, we’ll have to wait for the official word.