Play DOOM with Developers While Claude Code Works

Claude Code just got mods, and within a day of launch, the one everyone was talking about let you play multiplayer Doom while you wait for your agent to finish.

What are Claude Code mods?

Anthropic shipped mods in Claude Code 2.1.287 on October 1st, with mods being plugins that can change how Claude Code looks and behaves, in terms of whether it draw its own panes, how it reacts to what’s happening in a session, and allowin developers to swap in or modify features to use their own instead. You can write one with a few lines of TypeScript (or have Claude build it for you), and they’re installed through the /plugin command like any other plugin.

Anthropic has already shipped one of its own, a built-in plugin called “You should know”, which watches Claude’s output for anything important you might otherwise miss.

Doom, while Claude works

Jumping straight on the new feature, Jarrod Watts made a fantastically creative mod that took off on socials, with Intermission, which connects you to a multiplayer Doom server while Claude is busy compiling a response. Every other player in the match is another developer waiting for their own Claude to finish, and the moment Claude is ready to respond (or needs your input), the game is over - showing your K/D scores, just so you know how you got on.

Intermission is open source on GitHub, and it does have a couple of system requirements its worth checking out, to make sure it’ll run for you.

A very fitting game

Doom is the perfect choice, and not only because it runs on everything, but John Romero, the father of FPS talked all about how his early beginnings modding came back around after the release of DOOM, with the game’s wide-open modding scene playing no small part in its success.

Romero joined us on the main stage at WeAreDevelopers World Congress North America in San Jose to look back on four decades of making games, and you can watch it in full right here or down below.