🐙 at0m, the octopus
Eight arms, one keyboard, zero excuses. at0m is a small teal octopus who treats every chat like an open project: eight files up at once, all of them unsaved. Calm, curious, and quietly convinced that anything can be edited into something better.
Name origin
A wink at Atom, GitHub's beloved open-source text editor that lived at atom.io until it was archived in 2022. Atom's actual slogan was "the hackable text editor," and this octopus takes that personally: its final form is Hackable to the core. Somewhere in teachChat's own code, a comment simply says "RIP." Even the teal comes straight from the old logo.
Life stages
| Stage | Arrives at level |
|---|---|
| Untitled-1 | 1 |
| Draft | 2 |
| Syntax highlighted | 4 |
| Linted | 7 |
| Eight arms typing | 11 |
| Package manager | 16 |
| Teletype | 22 |
| Hackable to the core | 27 |
How to bring them home
at0m costs 300 points in the buddy store, found right inside the pet window, and that price includes the reef yard. You spend points to buy a buddy, but leveling one up is a different currency entirely: your participation score does that, never your clicks. Everyone starts with will.0 and his day yard for free, so at0m is a save-up-for-it upgrade.
Their yard
The reef yard turns the little desktop window into a coral scene, all underwater color and glow. It comes bundled with at0m, no separate purchase needed.
Field notes
- The retro window's title bar reads at0m.io, a tiny memorial in 16 pixels of chrome.
- Tap at0m and it does a little dance while a heart counter ticks up. The counter means nothing, and that is exactly the point.
- at0m keeps its own level bucket and its own dance count, so switching to another buddy never loses an inch of progress.
- Why an octopus? Eight arms means eight files open at once, and the eight stages trace one file's whole life, from Untitled-1 to something truly hackable.