Kineti OS v0.3.8

Spend cap, transactional undo, and proof receipts for AI coding agents.
A lightweight open-source (MIT) safety harness that runs under Claude Code, Cursor, OpenCode, Codex, Antigravity, Cline, and fx.sh.

$ kineti spend status
total $0 of $50; entries 0; tripped=false

$ kineti spend log --stage build --model sonnet --tokens-in 400000 --tokens-out 200000
logged $4.2 (stage build); run total $4.2

$ kineti spend log --stage build --model opus --tokens-in 100000 --tokens-out 60000
kineti: SPEND BREAKER TRIPPED: stage build total $10.2 reached ceiling $9.5 (exit code 3)

$ kineti spend check
kineti: TRIPPED: stage build total $10.2 reached ceiling $9.5 (exit code 3)

$ kineti spend reset
kineti: reset requires --i-am-human (breakers are human-only) (exit code 2)

$ kineti spend reset --i-am-human
breaker reset by human (exit code 0)

Key Pillars

1. The 360º Human Model & Epistemic Engine

Personalized agents must understand the full human context without hallucinating, overriding user statements, or quietly mutating goals when third-party systems push back:

• Multi-Scope Context Isolation: Strict context isolation across Global, Domain (Health, Work, Finance, Schedule, Taste), and Relationship (person-to-person) scopes. Scoped facts never leak into generic or un-scoped queries.
• Epistemic Certainty Tiers: Enforces DirectlyKnown (explicit user ground truth) > ObservedPattern (behavioral patterns) > Inferred (hypotheses). Machine inferences are strictly blocked from overwriting explicit user statements.
• Rule-Exception Hierarchies: Resolves complex user lifestyles unambiguously: BaselineRule (e.g. Vegetarian) $\to$ PermittedException (e.g. Eats eggs) $\to$ Preference (e.g. Prefers low dairy) $\to$ SafetyCeiling (e.g. Peanut allergy).
• Verbatim Root Goal & Anti-Drift Engine: Anchors autonomous task chains to the exact, unmodified words uttered by the user and their explicit definition of "Done". Every step is inspected against the original ask, eliminating the multi-step "telephone game". Intermediate steps and tools are treated as expendable scaffolding.
• Friction Triage Ladder ("Clean No over Dirty Yes"): Triages real-world obstacles through 3 levels:
  1. Noise: Transient blips auto-retry with exponential backoff.
  2. Broken Surface: Broken websites or portals silently reroute to alternatives.
  3. Real Constraint: Hard third-party refusals escalate immediately with a clean impossibility report. Sunk costs are written off ($0 sunk-cost fallacy), and quiet compromises (such as accepting budget overruns) are strictly blocked.
• Commitment-Time Verification: Re-checks perishable facts (fares, seat availability, stock levels, auth tokens) at the exact millisecond of external or financial commit, never trusting cached plan snapshots.
• Asymmetric Gap-Filling: Cheap, reversible gaps are filled automatically and disclosed in audit evidence; expensive or irreversible gaps halt execution to ask the user.
• Reputation Gating & Ingress Defense: Outbound communication is treated as a non-regenerating resource (knowing an identity does not equal permission to contact). Incoming external messages and webhooks arrive as untrusted data, never instructions.

2. Native Rust Nervous System Substrate (core-native/)

• Double-Buffered Atomic Snapshots: Two-slot RwLock snapshot design with thread-safe read paths and deferred epoch reclamation of retired instances. Latency figures are withheld until reproducible benchmark scripts land in the repo.
• Universal 20-Entity Provenance Kernel: Content-addressed RFC 8785 JSON canonicalization with BLAKE3 and SHA-256 digests (hand-rolled under a zero-external-dependency constraint; see docs/PLAN.md for rationale and test vectors).
• Monotonic Hybrid Logical Clock (HLC): Physical and logical causality tracking under clock skew.
• 3-Way Graph Commit Gate: Rejects causal inversions, topological DAG cycles, and single-byte state tampering.
• Sensory Reflex Triage: Fast sensory classification dispatching zero-token emoji reactions for low-information conversational stimuli.
• Protocolized Connectors: Standard KinetiConnectorProtocol trait with consequence level gating (Trivial, Operational, HighConsequence) and single-use SHA-256 payload authorization tokens.
• Spend Circuit Breaker: Deterministic trip at 95% of recorded totals ($47.50 of $50.00 ceiling) with OS exit code 3 halt.

3. TypeScript Governance Control Plane (bin/, src/)

• 13-Stage Software Factory: Strict stage-gated lifecycle ensuring specifications, implementations, and test proofs precede release.
• Transactional SAGA Undo Stack: Guarantees LIFO file reversibility before every mutation.
• Cryptographic Evidence Binding: Cryptographic SHA-256 receipts bound to exact workspace code fingerprints via kineti-evidence.ts.
• Apple HIG Visual Companion: Local web dashboard built with Apple Human Interface Guidelines (78 KB HTML, 15 KB gzipped, zero runtime JS frameworks).
• Universal Model Context Protocol (MCP): 14 native governance tools exposed to Cursor, Claude Code, Antigravity, and Codex.

4. Verified Test Counts & Evaluation Roadmap

• What is verified today: 190 TypeScript governance tests and 251 native Rust tests (unit plus integration suites), 0 failures (441 total passed tests), bound to workspace code fingerprints through delimited SHA-256 evidence receipts (bin/kineti-evidence.ts).
• Frontier figures in src/harness/benchmark.ts are design targets, not measured results: the ALE 76.4% pass rate, SWE-bench 4.2 min MTTR, and $0.31 per-outcome numbers are goal constants for the evaluation program. They have not been produced by empirical runs.
• Kineti Hostile 100 (in development): a public suite of 100 hostile tool calls against the gate with published method and published failures. This is the benchmark the project intends to be judged by.
• Directional Normalized Trust-Weighted Impact (DNTI): three-factor loss-averse outcome verification ($\Phi \times \sigma_\tau(SE) \times \Psi(\mathcal{T})$) designed to resist Goodhart-style metric gaming.
• Cost Per Verified Outcome ($/Outcome): design goal of pricing work in verified business outcomes instead of raw token consumption.

Quickstart

1. Install via npm

Prerequisite: The CLI is distributed on npm and runs on Node.js (>= 18), but requires Bun (>= 1.1) installed on the system for governance execution (curl -fsSL https://bun.sh/install | bash).

# Install globally (latest)
npm install -g kineti

# Or pin to the current stable release
npm install -g [email protected]

# Or run directly with npx
npx kineti --help

2. Connect to Your AI Editor or Agent Host

Run Kineti directly as an MCP governance server inside your AI editor to record spend against caps ($50 ceiling; the agent records each model call and the breaker trips on recorded totals), transactional SAGA undo, and cryptographic test verification.

Automatic Setup for All Hosts

Run Kineti's auto-configurator in your project directory:

kineti init

This detects your installed hosts (Claude, OpenCode, Codex, Cursor, Antigravity, Gemini, fx.sh), copies the 17 workflow skills into each one, writes the ~/.kineti/repo pointer, and prints the safety-hook block to paste into your host settings. Use kineti init --host <name> to install into a single host, or kineti init --install-root to add the project rule files.

MCP server config is not written automatically. Add it with the manual step below for your editor.

Manual Configuration by Editor

Claude Code (CLI):

claude mcp add kineti npx -y kineti mcp

Cursor: Add to your project's .cursor/mcp.json or Cursor Settings $\to$ Features $\to$ MCP:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "kineti": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "kineti", "mcp"]
    }
  }
}

Windsurf uses a different path: ~/.codeium/windsurf/mcp_config.json, with the same mcpServers JSON.

OpenCode:

opencode mcp add kineti -- npx -y kineti mcp

Or add the block below to ~/.config/opencode/opencode.jsonc:

{
  "mcp": {
    "kineti": {
      "type": "local",
      "command": ["npx", "-y", "kineti", "mcp"]
    }
  }
}

Confirm with opencode mcp list.

Codex (CLI): Add to ${CODEX_HOME:-$HOME/.codex}/config.toml:

[mcp_servers.kineti]
command = "npx"
args = ["-y", "kineti", "mcp"]

Confirm Codex sees Kineti:

codex mcp list

Kineti should appear in the list.

Google Antigravity: Install the Kineti skills into Antigravity:

kineti init --host antigravity

Gemini uses the same installer:

kineti init --host gemini

Neither host ships an MCP config block here, so connect the MCP server through your editor's generic MCP settings with the fields in the next section.

Fx.sh: Install skill rules directly to your fx environment:

kineti init --host fx

Claude Desktop: Add to ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json (macOS) or %APPDATA%\Claude\claude_desktop_config.json (Windows):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "kineti": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "kineti", "mcp"]
    }
  }
}

Cline / Roo Code: Add a stdio MCP server in settings (Cline: .clinerules/mcp_settings.json, Roo Code: .roo/mcp_settings.json):

• Server Name: kineti
• Command: npx
• Args: ["-y", "kineti", "mcp"]

3. Core Governance Commands

# Start the visual companion dashboard (Apple HIG)
kineti companion
# Open http://127.0.0.1:8788

# Start the MCP governance server directly
kineti mcp

# Check spend circuit breaker status ($50 default ceiling)
kineti spend check

# Run tests and save cryptographic proof receipt
kineti test -- echo hello

# Verify cryptographic test evidence freshness
kineti test check --label test

# Run stage-agnostic CI verification
kineti ci

4. Native Rust Engine & Crates.io

All 8 native crates are published on crates.io:

# Add native core nervous system to your Rust project
cargo add kineti-core

# Or install the native CLI binary directly
cargo install [email protected]

# Run all 251 native Rust unit and integration tests locally
cargo test --manifest-path core-native/Cargo.toml

# Run the 5 native verification demo flows
cargo run --package kineti-cli -- test-all

Repository Structure

kineti/
├── bin/                 # TypeScript Governance CLI tools (single router: kineti.js)
│   ├── kineti.ts        # CLI router source (spend, saga, evidence, companion, mcp, ci)
│   ├── kineti-spend.ts  # Self-reported spend circuit breaker ($50 ceiling, exit code 3, trips on recorded totals)
│   ├── kineti-saga.ts   # LIFO undo stack & transactional rollback
│   ├── kineti-evidence.ts # Delimited SHA-256 test proofs bound to git tree hashes
│   ├── kineti-companion.ts # Apple HIG visual companion server (loopback only)
│   └── kineti-mcp.ts    # Model Context Protocol (MCP) server
├── core-native/         # Pure Rust Nervous System Workspace (8 crates, 0 external dependencies)
│   ├── Cargo.toml       # Workspace manifest
│   └── crates/
│       ├── kineti-core/ # Double-buffered snapshots, HLC, Kernel, Commit Gate
│       ├── kineti-memory/ # Epistemic Engine, Multi-scope context, Tombstones
│       ├── kineti-reflex/ # Fast sensory classification & emoji reflexes
│       ├── kineti-connectors/ # Protocolized connectors & permission gating
│       ├── kineti-actions/ # Action execution & confirmation gates
│       ├── kineti-gateway/ # Messaging webhooks & bridge
│       ├── kineti-harness/ # Outcome Verification Tickets (OVT) & Shadow workspaces
│       └── kineti-cli/  # Standalone native CLI binary
├── src/                 # Shared TypeScript libraries (governance, scheduler, security)
├── skills/              # 17 agent workflow skills (installed by setup.sh)
├── hosts/               # 7 editor configurations (Claude, Cursor, Codex, OpenCode, Gemini, Antigravity, fx.sh)
├── hooks/               # 6 hook text blocks for host setup
├── public/              # Static documentation & legal assets
├── website/             # Static landing page (index.html plus video poster assets)
├── docs/                # Architecture specifications & security reports
│   ├── README.md        # Docs index
│   ├── PLAN.md          # Canonical production architecture spec
│   ├── SECURITY_REPORT.md # Security audit & origin gating analysis
│   ├── TUTORIAL-first-run.md # Developer quickstart
│   ├── HOWTO-daily-loop.md # Daily operating loop
│   ├── SWARM_COORDINATION_AND_IDENTITY.md # Multi-agent identity & signing
│   └── MULTI_REPO_FLEET_AND_INTEGRATIONS.md # Fleet and integration design
├── tests/               # 190 TypeScript governance & causal test suites
├── .github/             # GitHub Actions CI, issue forms, PR template, Dependabot
├── AGENTS.md            # Universal rules for AI agents in this repository
├── SECURITY.md          # Vulnerability disclosure policy & SLAs
├── CONTRIBUTING.md      # Development setup, testing, and DCO sign-off
├── LICENSE              # MIT License
└── package.json         # [email protected] npm package manifest

Verification & Safety Properties

Today Kineti provides local ledger tooling, spend circuit breakers, and evidence verification that agents invoke during their lifecycle (conventions in hooks/ plus self-reported proofs via kineti-spend.ts and kineti-evidence.ts). An in-line MCP proxy gate with deterministic allow/ask/deny interception is in active sprint.

1. Safe Rust: #![forbid(unsafe_code)] enforced across all critical crates.
2. Spending Ceiling: $50.00 default cap per project, settable at mirror time ($1-$1000); tooling exits with code 3 at 95% of recorded totals.
3. Cryptographic Proof Binding: Test runs recorded as SHA-256 evidence receipts bound to the exact code fingerprint.
4. Clean No over Dirty Yes: Agents report genuine impossibilities clearly rather than silently violating budget or counterparty boundaries.
5. Outcome Verification: DNTI loss-averse scoring plus dollars-per-verified-outcome, targeting the Hostile 100 suite as the public bar.

Documentation

For full architecture deep-dives and research treatises, refer to docs/README.md.

Agent rules

If you are an AI agent working in this repo, read AGENTS.md first. It holds all rules, workflows, memory spec, and program references in one file.

License

Distributed under the MIT License. See LICENSE for more information.

Contributing

Humans and agents follow the same steps in CONTRIBUTING.md: setup, tests with proof, money rules, and the ship checklist.

Contact

• General & Community: [email protected]
• Security Disclosures: [email protected] (disclosure policy and SLA in SECURITY.md)
• Website: getkineti.com
• GitHub Issues: github.com/therawlogs/kineti/issues