An agent
with claws.

A self-hosted, plugin-based agent harness. Four frontends, five backends, long-term memory.

MIT, self-hosted, multi-backend, and built to run as a real long-lived agent.
v1.19.0 claude sdk 3,300+ tests MIT
Overview

Built for agents that actually live somewhere.

Most harnesses are one-shot terminal wrappers. Talon runs as a long-lived process with persistent memory, hot-swappable MCP plugins, and frontends for wherever you need it — CLI, Telegram, Discord, Microsoft Teams, or your own.

Backends

One harness, five brains.

Every backend implements the same capability interface — heartbeat, dream, and chat handlers don't know or care which one is running. Streaming, model fallback, and context-overflow recovery come standard.

Claude SDK

"claude"

In-process via the Claude Agent SDK. Hook-based turn termination.

Kilo

"kilo"

Local HTTP server, SSE-streamed turns. Routes to many providers.

OpenCode

"opencode"

Local HTTP server. Same session shape as Kilo (upstream fork).

Codex

"codex"

Per-turn subprocess on the Codex CLI's JSONL event stream.

OpenAI Agents

"openai-agents"

Responses API, or any OpenAI-compatible endpoint.

Switch with one line: "backend": "claude" in ~/.talon/config.json.

Capabilities

Seven things that matter.

01

Pluggable backends

Claude Agent SDK, Kilo, OpenCode, Codex, OpenAI Agents — one capability interface. Streaming, model fallback, context-overflow recovery.

02

Plugin-based

18+ MCP plugins. Built-ins ship in the box; drop-in path plugins follow a uniform shape. Hot-reload at runtime.

03

Long-term memory

Mempalace integration. ChromaDB vector store + SQLite knowledge graph. Semantic recall across sessions.

04

Multi-frontend

Same brain, different mouths. Telegram, Discord, Teams, terminal — or write your own.

05

Dream & Heartbeat

Background modes for memory consolidation and proactive maintenance. Reflects on its own logs while you sleep.

06

Self-hosted

Your VPS, your data, your backend choice. 3,300+ tests. No vendor lock-in — swap the backend, keep the agent.

07

Soul Kernel

A model-free identity substrate that persists across sessions. Collects signal taps — reactions, corrections, directives — and builds a self-organizing representation independent of any backend.

Plugins

A growing ecosystem of MCP tools.

Internal plugins live in the talon repo. External path plugins live in the talon-agent org and follow a uniform shape: a package.json + an src/index.ts.

brave-search mempalace github playwright firecrawl tailscale ssh tfi twifork ccusage google-calendar gmail google-drive hugging-face ffmpeg email polymarket fli whois extras
22+
Plugins
3,300+
Tests passing
5
Backends
4
Frontends
GitHub

If Talon looks useful, star the repo.

Stars are the easiest public signal that this project is worth trying. They help developers find Talon before they settle for another thin chat wrapper.

Self-hosted agents with memory, plugins, and frontends that keep running.

Talon gives you Telegram, Discord, Teams, terminal, and desktop/mobile frontends over one agent core, with MCP plugins, cron, triggers, goals, heartbeat, and dream mode.

Five interchangeable backends 22+ MCP plugins and hot reload Persistent goals, triggers, and memory
Get started

Up and running in under a minute.

Install, run the setup wizard, start. Bring your own backend — Claude Code login, Codex, or an API key.

# install
$ npm install -g talon-agent

# set up
$ talon setup

# run
$ talon start
quick install