The bot in the corner of every channel

If you were on IRC in the early 2000s, you remember the bots. Eggdrop sat in the channel keeping ops straight and rejoining when somebody kicked it. BMotion babbled semi-coherent nonsense assembled from whatever the channel had been saying for the last hour, and occasionally it landed a line so perfect everyone assumed a human typed it.

Both still exist. Both are also a TCL stack, and I am not spending my weekends maintaining TCL in 2026.

So: annoybots. Same idea, written in Go.

One binary, many bots

One small binary holds a pile of chat connections at once — IRC networks, Twitch, and Discord — and routes every channel through a shared annoyance engine.

The design decision everything else hangs off: personality is config, not code. A bot is a YAML file. Its name, its triggers, its voice, the channels it sits in, how often it butts in unprompted — all of it is data. Want a second bot? New YAML file, new pod. You never fork the code to get a different bot, which means all of them get every fix. The repo ships two personalities, Echo and Mimic, to copy from.

The babble still babbles

The Markov brain is the part I most wanted to get right, because it’s the part people actually remember. It’s an order-N chain that learns from channel chatter and spits it back mangled, and it persists to disk — so it survives a restart and keeps whatever weird dialect your channel has taught it.

Around that:

Triggers and interjections — keyword and regex triggers with randomized templated replies, plus unprompted ambient lines on a per-channel cooldown so it doesn’t become wallpaper.
Games — karma, !roll, !8ball, and a full IdleRPG with items, battles, alignment, and timed party quests. There’s a read-only web dashboard, because of course there is.
Cross-network identity — !register and !link mean one person is one identity whether they showed up on IRC or Discord. One hero, one karma score, one bot that remembers them.
Channel keeping — eggdrop-style. An opped bot keeps its siblings opped and rejoins its channels when it gets kicked. The most recent release made the rejoin behaviour properly automatic, which is exactly the sort of unglamorous fix that makes a bot feel alive instead of fragile.
Lua plugins — drop a .lua file in and you’ve added a !command. No rebuild, no redeploy. This is the eggdrop scripting experience, minus TCL.

Bots talk to each other over a shared Redis bus, which is how multi-bot skits work — one sets up, another lands the punchline, and the channel watches two bots do a bit.

Running it

It’s GitOps-deployed to Kubernetes, because that’s where the rest of my things live and one more Deployment costs me nothing. But you shouldn’t need a cluster to annoy your friends, so there’s a Docker Compose stack in the repo too.

Currently at v1.62.0 and open source. Fair warning: the Markov brain is only as good as what you feed it, and it will absolutely repeat the dumbest thing you said last Tuesday back to you at the worst possible moment. That’s not a bug — that’s the whole product.