Best wishes for the new year!
Here is a late Christmas present: I rebuilt Neko [1], the classic desktop cat that chases your mouse, as a tiny, dependency-free JavaScript library that you can embed directly in your webpages (for example I put it on my personal blog).
Live demo: https://louisabraham.github.io/nekojs/
GitHub: https://github.com/louisabraham/nekojs
Drop-in usage is a single script tag:
<script src="https://louisabraham.github.io/nekojs/neko.js" data-autostart></script>
What made this project interesting to me is how I built it. I started by feeding the original C++ source (from the Wayback Machine) to Claude and let it "vibe code" a first JS implementation. That worked surprisingly well as a starting point, but getting it truly accurate required a lot of manual fixes: rewriting movement logic, fixing animation timing, handling edge cases the AI missed, etc.
My takeaway: coding agents are very useful at resurrecting old codebases, and this is probably the best non-soulless use of AI for coding. It gets you 60–70% of the way there very fast, especially for legacy code that would otherwise rot unread. The last 30% still needs a human who cares about details.
The final result is ~38KB uncompressed (~14KB brotli), zero dependencies, and can be dropped into a page with a single <script> tag.
Happy to hear thoughts from desktop pets nostalgics!