Coucou

A tiny friend that lives in your MacBook's notch — or at the top of your screen on Windows — and keeps an eye on your Claude Code sessions.

Approve permissions, watch your agents work, drop a file, chat with Claude — all without leaving what you're doing.

Why

Some studios showed off gorgeous notch companions… and never let anyone use them. Coucou is the open version. Every line of code, every animation, every sound — free to use, read, fork and remix.

Meet Mochi: a soft little squircle with big eyes that pops out of your notch, waves hello, follows your cursor with its eyes, gets annoyed when you poke it (and dizzy if you insist), and tells you the moment Claude Code needs you.

Features

🤖 Claude Code, live — see every session in your notch: what it reads, edits and runs, step by step. Finished? Mochi does a happy little jump.
✅ Approve from the notch — Claude Code permission requests show up with Allow / Deny. One click, back to work.
🧑‍💻 Jump to the right terminal — open the exact terminal window of a session (macOS).
💬 Ask Claude anything — built-in chat, straight from the notch.
📎 Drop a file on the notch — Mochi turns into a box and swallows it, then ask a question about it or send it by email (email: macOS, Mail.app).
🪟 Drag Mochi onto any window — attach that window as context for Claude (macOS).
🔌 Integrations — Stripe payments, n8n workflows, GitHub, Vercel deployments, Resend emails, Notion, Cal.com. Each one gets its own little colored Mochi.
🎭 A real character — idle breathing, blinks, eyes on a sphere that follow your mouse, emotes, 28 handcrafted sounds, a greeting on launch.
🫥 Invisible when idle — hides away when nothing is running, peeks out when you hover the notch (the top edge of the screen on Windows).
🔒 Private by design — no telemetry, no account. Keys live in your macOS Keychain or Windows Credential Manager. The app only talks to the services you plug in.

Install

Download for macOS

Grab the latest Coucou.zip from Releases.
Unzip and move Coucou.app to /Applications.
Launch. This build isn't notarized by Apple yet, so the first time macOS says it can't verify the developer: open System Settings → Privacy & Security, scroll down and click Open Anyway (only once).

Windows

The Windows installer is temporarily unavailable. Microsoft Defender wrongly flags the unsigned installer as malware; a false-positive report is under review at Microsoft and the installer will come back once it is cleared and signed. Until then you can build it from source.

There is no notch on a PC, so the island slides out of the top edge of the screen instead of hiding inside one. See windows/README.md for the rest of the differences.

Build from source

macOS — requirements: macOS 15+, Xcode 16+, XcodeGen.

brew install xcodegen
git clone https://github.com/Louis-CFM/coucou.git
cd coucou/NotchBuddy
xcodegen
open NotchBuddy.xcodeproj   # then ⌘R

Windows — requirements: Rust, Node 20+, MSVC build tools.

git clone https://github.com/Louis-CFM/coucou.git
cd coucou/windows
npm install
npm run pack                # installer lands in windows/release/

Setup

Click the Coucou icon in the menu bar (macOS) or in the system tray (Windows) → Settings…

What	Why	Where the key goes
Claude Code hooks	live sessions and approvals	Install hooks — Coucou backs up `~/.claude/settings.json`, merges its hooks and shows you the diff before writing anything
Anthropic API key	chat and questions about files	Keychain / Windows Credential Manager
Stripe, n8n, GitHub, Vercel, Resend, Notion, Cal.com	the integration pills	Keychain / Windows Credential Manager, all optional

If Coucou isn't running, the hook exits immediately: Claude Code is never blocked.

Things to try

Do this	Mochi does that
Hover the notch (top edge on Windows)	peeks out and says hi 👋
Click it	opens
Hover Mochi	blinks, eyes grow
Click Mochi	squish + annoyed
Click 3 times fast	😵‍💫 dizzy for a few seconds
Drag a file onto the island	turns into a box and swallows it
Drag Mochi onto a window (macOS)	attaches it as context

How it works

macOS

Island: a borderless NSPanel hugging the notch, driven by a small state machine (hidden → petit → home).
Character: drawn in SwiftUI Canvas + TimelineView at 60 fps — squircle body, eyes projected on a sphere, spring animations. No Rive, no Lottie, no images.
Claude Code: a tiny nb-hook script receives hook events and forwards them over a Unix socket to the app. For approvals it waits for your click, then answers the hook.
Integrations: lightweight pollers, paused when nothing is watching.
Sounds: 28 short WAVs played through preloaded AVAudioPlayers.

The macOS app is native Swift 6 / SwiftUI / AppKit with zero third-party dependencies.

Windows

A Tauri 2 app (Rust + TypeScript): the island is a transparent, always-on-top window that never steals focus, Mochi is drawn in Canvas 2D with the same shapes, timings and sounds as on the Mac.
Claude Code hooks go through a tiny coucou-hook.exe and a named pipe; keys live in Windows Credential Manager.
Details and differences in windows/README.md.

Contributing

Issues and PRs are very welcome — new integrations, new emotes, new sounds, bug fixes. See CONTRIBUTING.md.

Credits

Built by Louis Raillé with Claude Code. Inspired by the notch-companion concepts shared by design studios — this project is independent and not affiliated with any of them.

License

Code: MIT — use it, fork it, learn from it, just keep the copyright notice.

If Mochi made you smile, a ⭐ helps a lot.

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