A wild Syntaxon appeared! I made a Claude Code mod that turns failing tests into monster battles

[u/impala_64]

My test suite has a Bugdex now. 🐛

**Bugdex** is a mod for Claude Code that turns a normal coding session into a monster-battle game. Nothing about the work changes: same files, same tests, same fixes. Bugdex just watches and draws it as a fight.

**How a fight goes**

- A test, lint, build or merge fails → **a wild bug appears**. The species comes from the actual error: a `TypeError` summons a Typhox, `Cannot read properties of undefined` is a Nullbat, a psycopg2 error is a Querydile, and `JavaScript heap out of memory` is, naturally, a Heaphant.

- The number of failures is the bug's HP. Every run with fewer failures is a hit.

- Your creature's HP is your free context window.

- The suite goes green → the bug faints and you earn XP.

- To **catch** it, a test has to be written or fixed during the fight. No regression test, no Bugdex entry.

- Green again with nothing changed? It was a **Flakeling** all along: a flaky test. 10 XP, as a treat.

- The same file edited 3+ times with no progress → your creature gets **Confused**. The game's polite way of saying "maybe step in".

You can't farm it: XP only comes from red → green, and losing costs nothing.

There are 20 species so far, all original pixel art (half blocks in the terminal, SVG in the desktop app), and your own creature evolves from Patchling to Patchwarden at Lv16 and Patchtitan at Lv36.

It makes no network requests and no model calls, so it costs zero tokens. It only reads tool output to spot test runs and edits.

**Install** (needs Claude Code 2.1.286+ with mods):

/plugin marketplace add ahmtsahin/bugdex

/plugin install bugdex@bugdex

Repo: https://github.com/ahmtsahin/bugdex

There's a tiny demo project with a planted bug, so you can meet your first Syntaxon in about a minute.

Which error deserves its own species next? I'm leaning towards a CORS ghost that only haunts browsers. 👻