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

# npm (might throw warnings)
npm i -g @makefinks/daemon

# bun (recommended)
bun add -g @makefinks/daemon

# additional installs (macOS)
brew install sox # For Audio Input / Output

Then run with:

daemon

Note: DAEMON requires Bun at runtime. Install Bun first: curl -fsSL https://bun.com/install | bash

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 can be powered by any model available on OpenRouter. The TUI includes a model picker that can fetch and select models as they become available on OpenRouter. Models are sorted by average provider pricing and the picker includes information about their context window and caching support. Once a model is selected, the selection of the inference provider is possible. Open-source models can vary strongly between providers.

While all models on OpenRouter are supported, a curated list is included for the best experience. It is generally recommended to use Models that support caching due to being significantly cheaper in DAEMON

🎙️ 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.

✨ 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 all OpenRouter models and includes a curated default list. | | Session Persistence | Preferences and chat sessions stored locally on disk. | | Workspaces | 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. |

📦 Install (npm/bun)

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
# or via bun
bun add -g @makefinks/daemon

# Then run
daemon

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

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

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
# or
bun add -g playwright

# 2) Install Chromium browser binaries
npx playwright install chromium