Daimon

A local organ that gives any AI eyes, hands, and a face on your Mac.

Daimon is a local daemon for macOS that lets any MCP-capable AI client — Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Cursor, Codex, Copilot CLI, Antigravity, and more — see your screen, act on it, and show you what it's doing. It speaks the standard Model Context Protocol, so it works with any client and is tied to none.

It is an organ, not a driver: pull, not push. Daimon owns no loop and calls no AI — the client connects over MCP and pulls a sense or moves a hand when it wants. Being fully local and open, you can audit exactly what it does with your screen.

⚠️ Public beta. Daimon works end-to-end (installed, signed, driving real apps) but it is young. Use a sensible ceiling, read the security model below, and report issues.

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The triad

👁 Perceive — the senses

Sense	What	Tool
Vue	screen capture (pixels)	vue_snapshot, vue_displays
Touché passif	accessibility tree of a window	touche_tree
Touché actif	the element under a point	touche_probe

Daimon supplies pixels and structure only — it does no vision/OCR itself; the client looks with its own eyes. Bounded by default for token cost (max_depth, root, roles, summary, region, …).

✋ Act — the hands

Acting is a separate organ under a ceiling Daimon enforces itself (default L0, hands off):

Level	Scope	Gate
L0 READ	nothing	—
L1 NONDESTRUCTIVE	scroll, focus, navigate, hover	none
L2 INPUT	click (left/right/middle, double, modifiers), type, key, drag	none, unless the target is a point of no return
L3 VALIDATION	engaging buttons	human confirmation on any non-return
L4 AUTONOMOUS	full autonomy	none — everything traced

Tools: main_click, main_type, main_key, main_drag, main_hover, main_press, main_navigate, main_activate (+ L4-gated held-input primitives).

🪞 Show — the face

A premium, click-through, capture-invisible overlay highlights what the agent targets, ripples where it clicks, and emphasises the exact element you confirm at the gate. Never on an action's critical path. Off by default.

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Security model

Daimon is built so an AI can act on your machine safely:

• Daimon enforces the ceiling, not the client — any AI plugs in, none is trusted. The AI can never raise its own limit.
• Points of no return (send / delete / pay / drop-on-Trash …) are classified on the observed element (the AI re-probes the real target — a lying agent can't dodge the gate by mislabelling a button) and gated by a native macOS confirmation dialog. Timeout = deny.
• L4 full autonomy is unlocked only by a human typing a phrase out-of-band; consent is recorded in an append-only, hash-chained ledger. no-log = no-act. A forged state file can't escalate to L4.
• Secrets never leave: secret-role fields (AXSecureTextField) and declared apps are blanked in Touché and blacked out in Vue, before anything is served.
• Kill the process at any time — the physical override always wins.

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Install (macOS)

1. Download Daimon-<version>.dmg from the latest release.
2. Open it and drag Daimon to Applications.
3. Launch Daimon — the aperture glyph appears in the menu bar (no Dock icon). First run opens the onboarding window.
4. Register your AI clients (one click) and grant Screen Recording + Accessibility when guided.
5. Restart your AI client. It now has vue_*, touche_*, main_*, overlay_*.

The menu-bar dropdown lets you set the hands ceiling (L0–L3), toggle the overlay, re-run setup, and quit, any time.

macOS permissions attach to the app that launches Daimon (your terminal / IDE / AI app), not to Daimon.app — the onboarding explains this.

Supported AI clients (auto-detect + one-click register)

Claude Code · Claude Desktop · Cursor · Windsurf · GitHub Copilot CLI · Codex (CLI + Desktop) · Mistral Vibe · Antigravity (Desktop / IDE / CLI).

Registration is idempotent, reversible, and backed up — a malformed client config is refused, never overwritten. (Codex and Vibe use TOML; Daimon edits a # DAIMON:START/END marker block in place and leaves the rest of your config untouched.)

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Run from source

pip install -e ".[dev]"
daimon setup        # register into detected clients + guide permissions
daimon serve        # the MCP stdio server (what clients launch)

CLI: daimon install [--all] | uninstall | status | onboard | setup. Set the ceiling in ~/Library/Application Support/Daimon/config/motor.yaml (or via the menu bar). L4: python -m daimon.motor.control engage.

Build the signed DMG

See build/macos/README.md. Requires Xcode CLT, an Apple Developer ID, and notary credentials. ./build/macos/build_macos.sh (use --no-sign for a fast local build).

Tests

PYTHONPATH=src python -m pytest -q

The pure core (guard, reversibility, consent, audit, secrets filter, client registration, tray/menu, …) is unit-tested without macOS; the AppKit surfaces are smoke-validated.

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License

GNU AGPL-3.0-or-later. © Arborithm. If you run a modified version as a network service, the AGPL requires you to offer your users its source.

Reference & kinship: Omi — perception/action decoupled on macOS via the Accessibility API.