[Feature Request] Support multiple simultaneous desktop pets, optionally bound to tasks
Feature request
Allow users to wake and display more than one pet at the same time in the Codex desktop app.
Current behavior
The desktop app lets the user select one built-in or custom pet. That single floating pet aggregates activity from multiple chats and prioritizes chats that need attention. This works well for a single companion, but it does not visually distinguish parallel tasks.
Proposed experience
- Allow two or more pets to be awake simultaneously.
- Optionally bind each pet to a specific task/chat or project.
- Give each pet independent activity state, notification bubble, position, and tuck-away control.
- Keep the existing single-pet behavior as the default.
- Provide a sensible configurable limit to avoid clutter or excess resource usage.
- Preserve reduced-motion and accessibility behavior for every active pet.
- If per-task binding is too large for an initial version, a useful first step would be multiple visible pets sharing the existing activity tray.
Use case
Codex users often run several tasks in parallel. Multiple pets would make it immediately visible which task is running, ready, blocked, or waiting for input. It would also make custom pets more expressive and improve screen recordings, demos, and multi-agent workflows.
Example:
- Pet A follows a coding task.
- Pet B follows a research task.
- Each pet changes state independently and opens its assigned task when selected.
Environment
Observed in the Codex desktop app on Windows, where the current overlay exposes one active pet. The request is intended as a general desktop-app feature rather than a Windows-only behavior.