Daimonos MCP server

Daimonos

An agent-optimized OS layer that makes AI coding agents faster and cheaper.

Daimonos replaces the built-in file, search, exec, and git tools in your AI coding agent with structured equivalents that return compact JSON instead of raw terminal output. The result: fewer tokens consumed, fewer round-trips, and lower API costs — with zero changes to your workflow.

Platforms: Linux (x86_64, aarch64) and macOS (Apple Silicon, Intel). Windows support is planned.

For repository agent/operator conventions, see AGENTS.md (especially Daimonos tool usage policy).

The name comes from Greek daimon (agent/spirit), the etymological root of "daemon."

The problem

When an AI agent runs cargo test, it gets back hundreds of lines of terminal output — progress bars, compile messages, passing test names — when all it needs is "47 passed, 0 failed." The agent pays for every token of that noise: reading it, reasoning about it, and carrying it in context for the rest of the session.

The same waste happens with git status, docker ps, ls -la, and every other shell command. Agents spend 30-50% of their token budget on verbose, unstructured tool output.

How it works

Daimonos runs as an MCP server that your IDE or CLI spawns automatically. It provides the same operations agents already use — read files, write files, search, execute commands, git operations — but returns compact, structured JSON instead of raw text.

The single binary also provides ACP, one-shot agent, interactive chat, and socket-daemon runtimes — a full coding-agent harness in its own right; see Agent harness features below and Runtime modes for the explicit subcommands and compatibility aliases.

Agent: exec("cargo test")

Without Daimonos (raw terminal output):
   Compiling inventory v0.1.0 (/workspace)
    Finished `test` profile [unoptimized + debuginfo] target(s) in 2.31s
     Running unittests src/main.rs (target/debug/deps/inventory-abc123)
running 47 tests
test config::tests::test_default ... ok
test config::tests::test_load ... ok
... (200+ more lines)
test result: ok. 47 passed; 0 failed; 0 ignored

With Daimonos (structured JSON):
{"ok":true,"tests":47,"passed":47,"failed":0,"failures":[]}

Four layers of optimization

first-class MCP tools with structured JSON output. When agents call exec("cargo test"), Daimonos intercepts it and routes through the native plugin instead.

1. Native tool plugins — git, cargo, gh, and docker are exposed as

make, pip install, eslint, etc.), Daimonos applies semantic compression: test runners return summary + failures only, build commands return "ok" or just the errors, install commands return success/failure.

1. Semantic output filters — For commands without native plugins (pytest,

file returns {"unchanged":true} instead of the full content), compact field names, lazy tool exposure, batch operations, and a terse output directive that cuts LLM prose by ~30%.

1. Protocol-level efficiency — Read deduplication (re-reading an unchanged

Shortened. The full README is on GitHub.