The Finn: a grumpy AI agent that lives in your router and complains about your network
The Finn – an agent that lives in my router and complains about it
The Finn is a deliberately unhelpful AI agent that runs entirely on a GL.iNet router. It monitors the local network and hallway, detecting anomalies like unusual traffic, new devices, or failed SSH logins, and posts grumpy observations to Telegram. It has no tools or memory beyond a state file, and is designed to keep working even if your infrastructure fails. The project includes a novel anomaly detection system that adapts to normal behavior and enforces variety in what it reports.
Six failed SSH logins in the last minute, usually it's zero all night. Bloody hell, some tosser out there fancies his chances.
- kennywinker
> Everything runs on the router itself. If the rest of your infrastructure is on fire, this still works, which was most of the point.
And then a moment later:
> You need about ten minutes, a router you own, and a card on file with an LLM provider.
So it depends on a working internet connection and an external model server. No hate on you for making this - it’s a fun idea, but the first bit is pretty misleading
- bitwize
I used to refer to agents as "the Dixie Flatline" to my coworkers, especially to remind them that, for good or ill, when you start a session afresh the agent loses all previous context and forgets any conversation you may have had up to that point.
- YuriiKovalov
It swears like a pirate, has an anatomy to complain about (antennas are ears, ports
are fingers, the flash is its gut), and costs a couple of dollars a month. So far it
has told me about a Dropbox LAN-sync port, somebody's DNS-over-TLS, and my own laptop
waking up. None of it is useful. MIT, install script included.
600 lines of Lua on the router itself. lua + cjson + curl, one cron tick a minute,
no cloud collector, no agent framework. It reads /proc and iwinfo, keeps a rolling
45-minute history of every reading in tmpfs, and only calls a model when something
falls outside its own normal range. Then it decides whether that's worth saying,
and usually it isn't.
A Gibson joke that got out of hand. In Mona Lisa Overdrive the Finn ends up as a
construct in an armoured box bolted into an alley, and people come by to hear the
oracle grumble. I had a GL-MT3000 on the office wall, so.