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Welcome to Pixie

Pixie is a single local web app that lists every Python tool in your tools/ folder and renders a UI for each one from a tool.json schema. Tools run as isolated subprocesses with their own uv virtual environments. They spawn on click, stay warm for a few minutes, then shut down.

You add tools by talking to Claude Code. You don’t install anything through the UI.

Who Pixie is for

  • The developer with a ~/scripts folder full of one-off Python tools that never made it onto a website because deploying each one is overkill.
  • The researcher who has a Jupyter notebook for every paper they’ve read and wants a non-notebook way to re-run them.
  • The hobbyist who built a thing once, came back six months later, and couldn’t remember how to run it.
  • The Claude Code user who wants a place for the small tools an agent builds on the fly during a session to actually live.

What you get

  • A dashboard at http://localhost:7860 that scans tools/ on startup and shows everything it finds.
  • A schema-driven renderer that handles 25 input types (text, slider, date range, file, code editor, map polygon, …) and 39 output types (numbers, tables, every common chart, maps, image, audio, video, LaTeX, diff, log, streaming text, …).
  • A subprocess launcher with warm-keep, port allocation, and resource limits.
  • A validator that runs 11 checks end-to-end on every tool before it appears in the sidebar.
  • SQLite-backed run history (re-run any past input with one click).
  • A per-tool secrets UI that writes to the tool’s own .env and never displays values back.
  • A bundle of Claude Code skills for adding, editing, debugging, exporting, and organising tools.

What you don’t get

  • No accounts, no auth, no remote access — Pixie binds to 127.0.0.1 only.
  • No cloud, no telemetry, no sync — your data does not leave the machine.
  • No marketplace, no registry, no “publish” button — sharing a tool is cp -r tools/your-tool/ ~/somewhere-else/ && uv sync on the other side.
  • No Docker, no Kubernetes, no serverless — Pixie is a single Python process that spawns child processes.
  • No frontend build step — htmx + Alpine.js + pre-built Tailwind. Editing a template means editing a Jinja2 file.

How this site is organised

  • Start here — install, run, see the example tool, scaffold your first real tool.
  • Concepts — how the runtime, validator, and renderer fit together. Read this before contributing.
  • Build a tool — the full hand-authoring guide: tool.json, the HTTP contract, every input and output type, layouts, fixtures, streaming.
  • Claude Code skills — every shipped skill, what it does, what it refuses, example trigger phrases.
  • Tools cookbook — the tools that ship with Pixie (Lorenz attractor, n-body, sentiment over time, BERTopic, Whisper, …).
  • Reference — CLI, HTTP API, database schema, configuration.
  • Contributing — dev setup, code style, how to add a new input/output type, what’s out of scope.

If you’re just here to use Pixie, the Start here section is enough.