DAEMON

DAEMON (pronounced "day-mon") is an opinionated terminal-based AI agent with distinct sci-fi theming, delivered through a highly performant TUI powered by OpenTUI.

It supports text and voice interaction, can be fully controlled through hotkeys and offers vim-like controls.

DAEMON is focused on information-gathering workflows that benefit from grounded responses but can also interact with and control your system through the terminal with scoped permissions.

Installation

DAEMON requires Bun at runtime, but global installation is currently documented via npm because some Bun global setups can fail on native sqlite3 bindings pulled in by the optional memory feature.

# Install via npm
npm i -g @makefinks/daemon

# Additional installs (Audio)
brew install sox 

Then run with:

daemon

⚠️ Important Notes

1. DAEMON requires Bun at runtime. Install Bun first: curl -fsSL https://bun.com/install | bash
2. Windows is currently not supported (Only by using WSL - with minor issues)

See full installation details below for configuration and system dependencies.

Highlights

👤 Interactive Avatar

At the core of the TUI is DAEMON's animated avatar, reacting to what it's doing in real time: listening to audio input, reasoning about questions, calling tools, and generating an answer.

The avatar was deliberately designed to feel slightly ominous and alien-like playing into sci-fi depictions.

🧠 LLMs

DAEMON supports two model backends:

• OpenRouter (API key based)
• GitHub Copilot (GitHub-authenticated via Copilot CLI / SDK) (Experimental!)

For OpenRouter, DAEMON can fetch and browse available models and route to a specific OpenRouter inference provider. For GitHub Copilot, DAEMON can use your Copilot subscription and list available Copilot models when authenticated.

🎙️ Voice capabilities

SOTA transcription accuracy is achieved by using OpenAI's latest transcription model gpt-4o-mini-transcribe-2025-03-20. It features a large vocabulary and can transcribe multilingual inputs with complex terminology.

OpenAI's TTS model gpt-4o-mini-tts-2025-03-20 is used to generate voice output with as little latency as possible.

🔎 Web Search with Grounding

DAEMON uses the Exa search and fetch API for retrieving accurate and up-to-date information.

After fetching relevant information, DAEMON has the ability to ground statements with source links that contain highlightable fragments. The TUI comes with a menu for reading, verifying and opening sources for the current session.

For most statements, pressing Enter opens the source in your browser and highlights the passage that supports the claim.

"Use the grounding tool" / "Ground your answers"

💾 Session Persistence

DAEMON stores chat sessions locally (SQLite) and lets you resume past conversations.

🧠 Memory (mem0)

DAEMON can persist user-specific facts across sessions using mem0. Memory extraction runs automatically on user messages and relevant memories are injected into the conversation when helpful.

✨ Feature List

| Feature | Description | | --- | --- | | Terminal TUI | OpenTUI-powered interface with sci-fi styling and hotkey controls. | | Text + Voice | Supports text input and voice interaction with transcription and TTS. | | Animated Avatar | Sci-fi avatar reacts to listening, tool use, and response generation. | | Multi-Model Support | Works with OpenRouter and GitHub Copilot model backends. | | Session Persistence | Preferences and chat sessions stored locally on disk. | | Memory | Automatic persistance of user-specific facts with persistent recall using mem0 | | Workspaces | Session-scoped on-disk workspaces for the agent to work in. | | Web Search | Exa-based search and fetch for grounded, up-to-date info. | | Grounding | Text-fragment grounding with a dedicated UI. | | Bash Execution | Bash integration with approval scoping for potentially dangerous commands. | | JS Page Rendering | Optional Playwright renderer for SPA content. | | MCP | Model Context Protocol tools |

📦 Install (npm)

DAEMON is published as a CLI package. It requires Bun at runtime, even if you install via npm.

To install bun on macOs/Linux

curl -fsSL https://bun.com/install | bash

Then install DAEMON:

# Global npm install
npm i -g @makefinks/daemon

# Then run
daemon

Configuration is done via environment variables (or the onboarding UI):

• OPENROUTER_API_KEY (required only when OpenRouter is selected) - response generation via OpenRouter models
• EXA_API_KEY (optional) - enables web search + fetch grounding via Exa
• OPENAI_API_KEY (optional) - enables voice transcription + TTS

For Copilot, authenticate once with either GitHub CLI or Copilot CLI:

gh auth login
# or
copilot login

⚠️ GitHub Copilot authentication support is experimental.

Keys entered via the onboarding UI are stored locally in ~/.config/daemon/credentials.json with restricted permissions (0600). For maximum security, use environment variables instead.

🛠️ System dependencies

Voice input requires sox or other platform-specific audio libraries:

macOS

brew install sox

Linux (Debian/Ubuntu)

sudo apt install sox libsox-fmt-pulse

Linux (Fedora)

sudo dnf install sox sox-plugins-freeworld

Linux (Arch)

sudo pacman -S sox

🧩 Optional: JS-rendered page support (renderUrl)

DAEMON defaults to Exa-based fetchUrls for retrieving web page text. For JavaScript-heavy sites (SPAs) where fetchUrls returns "shell-only" content, DAEMON can optionally use a local Playwright Chromium renderer via the renderUrl tool.

This feature is optional and intentionally not installed by default (browser downloads are large). The render tool is not available to DAEMON without the installation below.

# 1) Install Playwright globally
npm i -g playwright

# 2) Install Chromium browser binaries
npx playwright install chromium

🔌 MCP server setup (Model Context Protocol)

DAEMON can load MCP tools from external servers and expose them to the agent at runtime. MCP servers are configured via a local config file.

Default config path:

• macOS/Linux: ~/.config/daemon/config.json

Example config:

{
  "mcpServers": [
    {
      "id": "local-mcp",
      "type": "http",
      "url": "http://localhost:3333/mcp"
    },
    {
      "type": "sse",
      "url": "https://example.com/mcp/sse"
    }
  ]
}

Notes:

• type must be http or sse.
• url is the MCP endpoint URL for the server.
• id is optional; if omitted, DAEMON derives one from the host.
• MCP server status and tools appear in the Tools menu once configured.