Claude Code codebase is leaked

“Throw insane amounts of compute at some developer fan fiction and hope for the best.” is such a good description of vibe coding.

I’ve always wondered why software licenses tend to have a part written in ALL CAPS… now I finally understand, it’s for the AI bots.

Word of warning, there is a code download going round with mallware in it: https://www.theregister.com/2026/04/02/trojanized_claude_code_leak_github/

By far the dumbest “feature” in the codebase is this thing called “Buddy” (described in a few places such as here). Honestly, I don’t really know what it’s for or what the point is.

BUDDY - A Tamagotchi Inside Your Terminal

I am not making this up.

Claude Code has a full Tamagotchi-style companion pet system called “Buddy.” A deterministic gacha system with species rarity, shiny variants, procedurally generated stats, and a soul description written by Claude on first hatch like OpenClaw.

…

On top of that, there’s a 1% shiny chance completely independent of rarity. So a Shiny Legendary Nebulynx has a 0.01% chance of being rolled. Dang.

Great, so they were planning on a gacha system where you can get an ASCII virtual pet that, uhh, occasionally makes comments? Truly a serious feature for a serious tool for the serious discipline of software engineering. Imagine if IntelliJ decided to pull this bullshit.

But also, Claude Code is leaning hard into gambling addiction — the “Hooked” model. You reward the user with an intermittent, variable reward. This keeps them coming back in the hope of the big win. And it turns them into gambling addicts.

The Onion could not have come up with a better way to illustrate this very point.

Not sure if I should post it here or the stubsack, somebody went through the claude code https://neuromatch.social/@jonny/116324676116121930 (via @aliettedebodard.com and @olivia.science on bsky)

Morged.

So there’s a chance that Anthropic won’t be able to go after anyone with the Claude codebase because copyright laws?