compiling

Local companion for compiling.games — cozy browser games for the gaps while your code compiles or your coding agent runs.

npx compiling

opens a cozy arrow-key menu of everything right in your terminal — one row per game (·d marks a daily: Enter free-plays, d plays the daily), what plays right here, what opens in your browser, and the recorded ambience beds. A "got 2 minutes?" row up top names a pick (got 2 minutes? → Golf) — Enter runs it in the terminal when nothing is linked, r re-rolls. / filters the list live (same fuzzy matching as the site's ⌘K palette; Esc clears), and D/2/5/3 are canned views: dailies, 2-minute, 5-minute, 30-second games. Enter does the best available thing: a linked tab gets driven (the status line then shows what it's playing), a terminal-playable game runs right here, an ambience bed loops locally while the menu stays open (+/- nudge the volume — local bed or driven site mixer alike — Enter stops it, quitting stops it — no daemons), anything else opens the site. When no relay or tab is linked, a quiet Setup section offers to fix it in place (s jumps to it); once healthy it disappears. The list comes from the site's own catalog.json, so it's never stale — and it carries the current CLI version, so quitting the menu prints one quiet line when a newer compiling exists (npx caches forever; nothing else would tell you). q quits; piped or --help prints plain usage instead. Point it at a dev server with COMPILING_SITE=http://localhost:3000.

npx compiling setup

walks you to a linked, chiming browser without leaving the terminal: it starts the relay (and leaves it up — a wizard that un-does its own work is a worse surprise), opens the site's setup page, flips to "● tab linked" the moment your browser connects, and offers to install the Claude Code hooks. The install (compiling hook claude --install) merges into ~/.claude/settings.json non-destructively: existing hooks kept, a timestamped .bak written first, the change shown before writing, and running it twice is a friendly no-op. compiling hook claude alone prints the JSON for hand-merging; compiling setup on a pipe prints the manual steps and exits 0.

npx compiling play snake

plays real games in your terminal — no browser, no setup, no dependencies. Snake and 2048 run on the exact same rules modules the site ships (arrows, WASD, or hjkl; q/Esc/Ctrl-C always restore your terminal; Ctrl-Z suspends clean and resumes paused). Recorded ambience loops here too: compiling play rain 40 fetches the site's rain bed once, caches it, and loops it at volume 40 until Ctrl-C (macOS afplay, or mpg123/ffplay on Linux; Windows audio is a fast-follow — the games already work in Windows Terminal). Bare compiling play lists what plays here.

npx compiling relay

starts a tiny relay on http://127.0.0.1:8303 (8303 for xkcd #303). Your coding agent's hooks POST an event when a run finishes or needs your input; every linked compiling.games tab gets a soft chime, the ambience ducks, and your game pauses — the site hands you back to work.

Full setup (Claude Code hook JSON, linking a tab): https://compiling.games/setup/

Protocol

• POST /event with {"type": "done" | "waiting" | "started", "source"?: string, "detail"?: string} → broadcast to every connected tab. Fire-and-forget friendly: use curl -s -m 1 … || true in hooks so a stopped relay never slows anything.
• GET /health → {"clients": n}
• WebSocket on the same port — this is what site tabs connect to. When several tabs are linked, the relay tags the most recently focused one; only that tab chimes, the rest just duck their ambience.

Security posture

The relay binds 127.0.0.1 only and uses no tokens, deliberately:

• Nothing leaves the machine, and nothing off the machine can reach it.
• Any local process can POST an event — and the worst that does is play a soft chime in your own browser. The event vocabulary carries no secrets (a type, an optional source label, an optional short detail string), so there is nothing worth protecting with a token handshake.
• The WebSocket side checks the Origin header, so arbitrary web pages you visit can't listen to your events either.

If the vocabulary ever grows beyond "chime, please", this posture gets revisited before it ships.