Gen Đần — a Telegram bot powered by the agy CLI

Gen Đần ("gen đần" ≈ "the dim generation") listens in Telegram groups, forum topics and DMs, stores what it sees into PostgreSQL, and answers when it is mentioned, replied to, or DM'd. Replies come from the locally-authed Antigravity CLI (agy), which sends them itself through an MCP server this project hosts.

It reads images people post, remembers things long-term per chat, searches its own older history, and can schedule reminders — all as MCP tools agy chooses to call.

One make dev brings up the whole stack.

Documentation

Contributing or working on this with an agent? Start with CLAUDE.md.

Related MCP server: tgmcp

Prerequisites

• Docker running.

• agy installed and signed in on the host. Install it, run agy once, sign in, and confirm agy -p "hi" prints a reply. That writes an OAuth token to ~/.gemini/antigravity-cli/antigravity-oauth-token.

• The stack bind-mounts that token file into the worker container read-write — agy rewrites it in place on refresh, so a read-only mount eventually breaks auth. The token file alone is enough; agy bootstraps the rest inside the container.

make dev / make prod refuse to start with a clear message if the token is missing.

Setup

cp .env.example .env

Fill in TELEGRAM_BOT_TOKEN (from @BotFather → /newbot) and TELEGRAM_BOT_USERNAME (without the @). Everything else has a working local default — see configuration.md.

make dev          # build + start db, redis, mcp, bot, worker, beat

Secrets never enter git: .env is gitignored and the agy token stays on the host.

Make Gen Đần an admin in every group you add it to, or disable privacy mode in BotFather — otherwise it only receives messages that already mention it and its history is full of holes. Details and the re-add caveat: replies.md.

Deploy to a VPS

docker-compose.dev.yml bind-mounts the source and hot-reloads — great locally, wrong for a server. Dockerfile + docker-compose.yml are the production pair: a multi-stage image with the code baked in, no dev tooling, no watcher, restart: always, and nothing published on the host.

On the box (Docker + a signed-in agy, so the OAuth token exists):

git clone https://github.com/quango2304/telegram_agy && cd telegram_agy
cp .env.example .env         # fill TELEGRAM_BOT_TOKEN + TELEGRAM_BOT_USERNAME
make prod                    # builds there, runs detached
make prod-logs               # tail

Update = git pull && make prod (rebuilds, recreates, re-runs migrations from the bot entrypoint). Inspect with docker compose -f docker-compose.yml exec … — db, redis and mcp are only reachable inside the compose network.

The entrypoint chowns /home/agy on start so the root-owned bind-mounted token is readable by the unprivileged agy user on native Linux (Docker Desktop remaps this automatically; a plain Linux host does not).

worker scales freely (--scale worker=3); bot and beat must stay at exactly 1. Costs, per-reply token numbers and the reasoning behind them are in architecture.md and media.md.

Before you expose this

The bot is open to anyone and runs agy with --dangerously-skip-permissions, so anyone who can message it can cause commands to run inside the worker container. The container is not a security boundary. Read security.md first.