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 i -g @makefinks/daemon

# Additional installs (Audio)
brew install sox 

Then run with:

daemon

⚠️ Important Notes

1. Development requires Bun (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.

While DAEMON is encouraged to always cite sources you can always prompt to get groundings:

"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.
Browser Tools	Built-in Chrome DevTools MCP for rendered pages, browser inspection, and frontend debugging.
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

🔌 MCP server setup (Model Context Protocol)

DAEMON can load MCP tools from external servers and expose them to the agent at runtime. Chrome DevTools MCP ships as a built-in default server and can be toggled from the Tools menu. Additional 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"
    },
    {
      "id": "custom-stdio",
      "type": "stdio",
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "some-mcp-server@latest"]
    }
  ]
}

Notes:

• The built-in Chrome DevTools server uses npx -y chrome-devtools-mcp@latest and launches Chrome with US English locale headers by default.
• type must be http, sse, or stdio.
• url is required for http and sse servers.
• command is required for stdio servers, and args, cwd, and env are optional.
• id is optional; if omitted, DAEMON derives one from the host.
• Defining a server with id: "chrome-devtools" overrides the built-in Chrome DevTools config.
• MCP server status, source, and enablement appear in the Tools menu.