Anthropic removed the /buddy feature from Claude Code in v2.1.97, leaving users with a single error message: "Unknown skill: buddy". The change landed just one day after the feature was broadly opened to Pro subscribers on April 8, and the sudden disappearance quickly drew complaints from developers.
Source code leak exposed the hidden feature
The issue traces back to March 31, 2026, when Anthropic accidentally published Claude Code's full source package to npm because of a .npmignore configuration mistake. The leaked release was @anthropic-ai/claude-code v2.1.88, containing 512,000 lines of TypeScript, 1,900 files, and 59.8 MB of data. Security researcher Chaofan Shou first surfaced the leak, but community attention soon shifted to a hidden feature found inside the codebase.
That feature was /buddy, described in the leaked code as a small digital pet that sits next to the terminal input box and reacts to coding conversations. Its design, compared in the report to characters from classic virtual pet devices, changed the tone of the discussion. Anger over the leak gave way to curiosity about what Anthropic had been building.
18 species, rarity tiers, and AI-generated personalities
The exposed code showed that Buddy was built with a full internal system. Users could adopt from 18 species, including duck, cat, rabbit, capybara, ghost, blob, and mushroom. Rarity ranged from Common at 60% to Legendary at 1%, with a separate 1% chance for a shiny variant. Each Buddy also carried five RPG-style attributes scored from 0 to 100, including CHAOS and SNARK.
The report said every Buddy also had its own AI-generated “soul,” allowing it to react to user conversations with a distinct personality. Developers began treating it as more than a novelty. In community discussion, it was framed as one of the few visible ways Claude Code could stand apart from tools such as Cursor and GitHub Copilot.
Feature rollout was brief before removal
Anthropic started pushing /buddy to Pro users in v2.1.89 and made it broadly available on April 8. Before users could do much with it, v2.1.97 arrived on April 9 and removed the feature. Requests for cosmetic customization, VSCode support, cross-session memory, and sub-agent buddies had already started circulating in the community, but the feature was gone before any of that moved forward.
Several GitHub issues appeared soon after, including the “Bring Back Buddy” petition at Issue #45596, along with #45517 and #45525, which all pointed to the same change: /buddy no longer worked in v2.1.97 and still worked in v2.1.96. Some developers reportedly downgraded manually to keep their existing Buddy active. Within two days, third-party tools including claude-code-buddy-reroll and any-buddy also appeared.
At the time of publication, the official Claude changelog had not mentioned the removal and Anthropic had not issued a public explanation. The report also noted complaints around Claude Code's paid /fast mode, which users said was not faster than the previous standard mode. Whether /buddy returns remains unanswered.