In a sea of AI-related news focus on efficiency and infrastructure, former Google software engineer Gary Sheng is bringing some much-needed playfulness with Peon Ping.
The plugin hooks into Claude Code and plays video game sounds when the AI has a question, needs approval, or when it’s idle. It frees developers to do other tasks on their computers without having to watch their terminals or make sure their pricey AIs stay on task.
The free open-source tool, listed on Microsoft-owned GitHub, offers sounds from over 100 video games and movie franchises, but the most popular come from the tool’s namesake: Warcraft III, in which peons are well-known characters. These green-skinned, simple-minded orcs build villages and mine resources, repeating the same phrases as they go about their work, such as, “Work, work”; “What do you want?”; “Something need doing?”
(Credit: Peon Ping)
My siblings and I used to repeat these phrases to each other as inside jokes growing up, trying our best to mimic the deep voice, like a froggy version of Yoda. The sounds are beloved by many to this day. “It’s the same as hearing your favorite songs that you can’t forget from when you were a kid,” Sheng says. “You would hear them again and again, and it has a certain emotional valence to it.” Growing up, he played Warcraft III’s Defense of the Ancients (DOTA).
The project is also a family affair for 32-year-old Sheng. His brother Tony, 36, built Peon Ping in an hour and listed it on GitHub as an open-source project available for anyone to download. “It’s probably the stupidest thing I’ve ever shipped,” Tony Sheng wrote on X in a post that has 3,600 likes. “And according to everybody that has used it, it’s also incredibly useful.”
Tony has since handed Peon Ping off to Gary, who oversees its improvements and growth as a side project to his full-time job as founder of the Applied AI Society. He estimates it has about 100,000 users at this point; things really took off after Peon Ping was featured on Hacker News, and when Visual Studio Code (VS Code)—the most popular development environment—integrated it for its estimated 50 million VS Code users to try.
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Open Source As a ‘Democratizing Force’ for AI
Peon Ping may be a relatively simple, contained concept, but it sits within a broader, potentially game-changing AI trend. Independent, open-source projects are going viral as developers experiment, unexpectedly shaping the industry’s trajectory. Most notable is OpenClaw, an agent that went viral, racked up 236,000 stars on GitHub, and landed its creator, Peter Steinberger, a job at OpenAI. “If you’re a builder, what a time to be alive,” Steinberger says.
“Open source can be a democratizing force,” Sheng says. He explains that while companies like Anthropic and OpenAI tend to keep their trade secrets close, open-source projects can offer similar value for free. “It makes it so these companies have to keep their prices at a reasonable rate because you can always switch to an open alternative.”
Sheng, who’s based in Austin, doesn’t expect Peon Ping to become his main gig, or to make any money from it. Mostly, he sees himself contributing to the broader experiment of applying AI to everyday life. Open-source projects also “can normalize ideas very quickly,” he adds. “One day, people weren’t really having sounds when they were working on Claude Code. But now, it’s a thing to be notified when your AIs are done. A lot of people are paying a lot of money to just have access to this compute, so when your terminal is sleeping, you are squandering some of the credits you already paid for.”
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A peon desktop companion stays alert when the terminal is working, and snoozes when it’s idle. (Credit: Gary Sheng)
Sheng also now offers a desktop animation of a peon that hovers in the corner of the screen, reminiscent of Microsoft’s Clippy. The peon is typing on a laptop when the AI is working, and dozing off when it’s idle. He has also improved the main Peon Ping code to make it easier for people to access and to help them list “packs,” or their favorite sounds, from properties like Age of Empires or The Sopranos. Momentum on open-source projects can “really die” without constant improvement and engagement with user feedback, Sheng says.
From Dancing Pineapples to Peons
Gary and Tony Sheng in a rural village in China. (Credit: Gary Sheng)
Sheng’s background includes building communities, offline and online, though not the ones you might expect from a Google-trained AI founder. From 2015 to 2019, he ran Dancing Pineapple, a SoundCloud community of “tropical house music” that gained a following. The project ultimately spun out into in-person raves in New York City and Los Angeles.
“So random, right?” he says. “But it was awesome, and totally scratching a personal itch where I wanted to curate that music for myself.”
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He also founded an online community in 2017 dedicated to exposing police brutality, called Woke Folks. Regarding the name: “It was clearly of a certain time,” he says with a smile, likely hinting at how much political baggage the term “woke” has picked up since then. While dance parties and activism may not seem like a natural lead-in for a Claude Code add-on, these pet projects gave him skills he has used to grow Peon Ping.
“I think a lot about how to use the gifts that I was born with and have cultivated,” he says. The same goes for his brother Tony, who, Gary notes, is a “super gamer nerd” and “product management-type visionary” who has been experimenting with coding. Peon Ping was the perfect hobbyist project for Tony’s interests. But going forward, they agreed Gary was the right person to grow and scale it, given his community-building background and software engineering training: “Doing [Peon Ping] just fits my entire background.”
Time will tell how much staying power Peon Ping has. (Most people are downloading the sounds off YouTube to create the packs, so that might run into some copyright issues.) Either way, Sheng will continue experimenting with AI tools.
Sheng sends me a digital ‘thank you letter’ created with his OpenClaw agent. (Credit: Gary Sheng)
After our interview, I received a curious message from him on LinkedIn: A digital “thank you” card that he created with his OpenClaw agent. A link opened in a new tab, where I clicked an animation of a golden letter. It opened to reveal the note, set to tranquil music. It then prompted me to send one back with just a few clicks after speaking into my phone to record my response and pick music to set it to. Awesome.
“It’s going to keep getting funner and weirder, that’s for sure,” Sheng says.
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