No red flags found in any of the 11 categories — no credential harvesting, no data exfiltration, no curl-pipe-shell installer. Scanned against the SlowMist agent-security taxonomy, refreshed every 8 hours. Full audit →
by cactus-compute · LLM Plugin · ★ 11.6k
Last updated: · Indexed by AgentSkillsHub · Auto-synced every 8h
🔒 Is needle safe to install? View the security audit →
A foundation model for mobiles, wearables, robots, smart home, automotive and microcontrollers. The whole model is a single 8-29 MB binary built on our Simple Attention Network, and we trade general chat capacity to beat models 10x its size on mobile tool calls and match 2-3x bigger models on extraction. Tool calls: given the functions your app exposes, Needle picks the right ones and fills every argument from what the user said. Ask for two things and you get two calls in order; ask for something no tool covers and you get an empty list, not a guess. Structured extraction: declare a shape, hand over messy text, get typed fields back: an invoice, a booking, a notification, a form. The decode grammar guarantees the output parses, and extraction generalises to classification. Text embedding: the same model returns a vector for a sentence, so an app can search, match and route locally. Needle 3 is a Laddered Simple Attention Network: a Monarch Hadamard MLP in place of the FFN, GQA attention with causal conv taps, engram n-gram memory read by gather, and multi-lane hyper-connections, trained so that every depth from 2 to 20 layers is a deployable model.
| Stars | 11,638 |
| Forks | 743 |
| Language | Python |
| Category | LLM Plugin |
| License | Apache-2.0 |
| Quality Score | 65.6103141459638/100 |
| Open Issues | 29 |
| Last Updated | 2026-09-19 |
| Created | 2026-02-24 |
| Platforms | python |
| Est. Tokens | ~15k |
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needle is Automation foundation model for tiny devices: 2-bit, 8-29 MB, tool calls, structured extraction and embeddings on phones, wearables, smart homes, robots, cars and microcontrollers.. It is categorized as a LLM Plugin with 11.6k GitHub stars.
needle is primarily written in Python. It covers topics such as cactus, edge-ai, foundation-model.
You can find installation instructions and usage details in the needle GitHub repository at github.com/cactus-compute/needle. The project has 11.6k stars and 743 forks, indicating an active community.
needle is released under the Apache-2.0 license, making it free to use and modify according to the license terms.
The top alternatives to needle on Agent Skills Hub include composio, aichat, klavis. Each offers a different approach to the same problem space — compare them side-by-side by stars, quality score, and community activity.
Grades come from a rule-based scan built on the SlowMist agent-security taxonomy, covering 11 red-flag categories including credential harvesting, data exfiltration, and curl | sh installers. It is a first-layer scan, not a manual audit — we say so rather than overstate it.
The scale of the problem is documented independently: Liu et al. (2026), in a study of 31,132 agent skills, report that 26.1% contain security vulnerabilities. Our own full-catalog census is published as a citable open dataset.
Sources & who's responsible: