Download
← All posts
Updates Jun 11, 2026

Custom pixel skins - give your Desktop Buddy any look you want

The most-requested feature of the last twenty updates - generate your own animated pixel buddy right inside Skales, with live preview. Skales, Bubbles and Capy stay the stars; now they have a wardrobe.

The Desktop Buddy is the most-used part of Skales: the little companion that lives on your screen, executes real tasks and asks for approval right in its speech bubble. Skales the gecko, Bubbles the blob and Capy the capybara are the three faces of the app - and they are not going anywhere.

But for twenty updates straight, one wish kept topping the requests: "Can I have my own buddy?"

Since v11.3.2, you can.

Generate a buddy from one sentence

Open the chat and type: "make me a purple octopus buddy". Skales generates an animated pixel character - shape, colors, eyes, ears, tail, accessory - rendered locally in seconds, with a live preview before you commit. Or open the pet creator (Settings → General → Buddy Skin → the "+" card) and design it by hand.

It reacts to what your agent does

A pixel skin is not a static sticker. It inspects while Skales thinks, waits during approvals, slumps on errors and waves hello. While the buddy works, its speech bubble streams live progress, step by step - same agent loop, new outfit.

Import community sprites

The skins use an open sprite format (Petdex), so community-made characters import with a single paste. Thousands exist; bring any of them, or share your own creations on the Discover feed.

The three mascots remain the default - and honestly, the gecko is hard to beat. But your buddy, your rules.

New here? The Buddy ships with every install - grab Skales for free, it takes 30 seconds.

New here? Skales is the private AI agent you install like an app - free for personal use, any model, everything stays on your machine.

Download Skales

More from the blog

Updates Sep 6, 2026 Skales v12.9.26 - Grip Grip is the release where Skales stops when you say stop, and tells you what it costs before it spends. Under every reply sits the price of the session, read from the provider or from the price table, with the sub-agents' bill included; a ceiling you set in Goals stops a run before the next paid step and asks you three things - continue, take a cheaper model, or stop - in the chat, in the Code window, in Iris and on the phone. A typed "stop" is honoured before the first request leaves the machine, and a stopped run says so in its own bubble instead of pretending it finished. Credentials are locked away from the file, shell and search tools; a bulk action or a publish asks first, in every mode, and a yes never covers more than the card names. Updates Sep 4, 2026 Skales v12.9.25 - Backbone Backbone is the release where Skales got one engine. A chat you type, a task you scheduled, a job on a timer, a plugin, a webhook, a Discord message, a Telegram or WhatsApp turn and the desktop Buddy used to run on different loops with different rules; now they all run on the same one, with the same guards, the same budget and the same record of what happened. Close Skales in the middle of a run, update it, let it crash: the run comes back as an unfinished run, says how far it got, and one Continue picks it up at that step. Ask for something big and Skales can hand parts of it to sub-agents, each in its own checkout of your repository, and collect the results. Under every reply sits a context meter that names what filled the window: the system prompt, the tool definitions, your skills, your memory and the conversation itself. Updates Sep 2, 2026 Skales v12.9.21 - Cockpit 2.0 Cockpit 2.0 is named for the screen it replaces. What used to be two stacked tab bars, a second title and a row of icon chips is now one board: everything that stands, in four columns, with goals, your own tasks, Autopilot tasks and schedules as cards you can filter, drag and act on. One head, one action. The phone got the same board in 2.9.21, and a computer on an older version still fills it from what it can tell rather than showing an empty screen.

All posts →