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Kite installs from a script in a public repository. It is not on PyPI, which means the repository has to stay public for the raw file URLs to resolve.

Then run kite inside a repository; it needs >=3.11 or newer. Manual install, update, and uninstall are in the README.

Two modes. Plan blocks write, edit, bash at the dispatch layer, so nothing is written even if the model tries, and it adds back the read, search, and fetch tools on top. Build restores write access.

Switch with /plan and /build inside a session, or start with kite run --mode plan "…".

kite setup configures a provider and a default model. The catalog hardcodes no model ids, so kite models fetches the live list from whichever provider you point it at.

Subscription providers use a plan you already pay for rather than API credits. Link one with kite login <provider>. Keys are read from your user config or the environment, never from the project repository.

Each tool call has its side effects derived before it runs, and those effects decide whether a human is asked. Autonomy is one of auto, trust, supervised, yolo, or readonly.

In auto, trust, and yolo the agent runs on its own and only risky classes prompt. supervised prompts on every mutation.

With no approver available, calls in a mandatory class are refused rather than run, and a crew inherits its parent's policy so a restricted parent cannot be escaped by delegating.

A skill is a markdown file with name and description frontmatter in a SKILL.md. Kite reads the description to decide relevance and loads the body when a task matches. Lookup order is bundled, ~/.kite/skills, ~/.agents/skills, plugins, then .kite/skills in the project.

A workspace plugin lives in .kite/plugins/<name>/ and can bundle commands and skills for one project. Python extensions can register tools through the extension API, documented in architecture.md.

Parallelism is explicit rather than inferred. read, grep, glob, and ls are concurrency-safe. bash, task, subagent, and submit are serial, and sibling subagent calls are coalesced into one crew dispatch.

Web search, fetch, and crawl work with no extra setup through DuckDuckGo. Context7 library documentation lookup is on by default. The GitHub tools are off until you enable them.

subagent delegates. A worker cannot spawn further agents or write to memory, and every subagent returns a fixed contract of result, files touched, and tests run, so the parent verifies rather than trusts.

Each subagent gets its own step and cost budget with a 300 second timeout.

The collector derives verification from tool results and explicitly not from what the model claims. When the gate blocks a submit, the refusal names a command to run.

The plan is discovered from your workspace: Python, JavaScript, Rust, and Go are detected from their markers, and a .kite/verification.toml overrides the whole thing. The gate is on by default and is one config flag to turn off.

Sessions are JSONL. Continue one with kite resume --last or browse with kite sessions. Context is discovered from the project, and memory injection is opt-in rather than on by default.

These are the shipped defaults, read from src/kite/data/configs/default.toml. Override them in ~/.kite/configs/default.toml.

When a run hits a ceiling it reports which one and how to continue, rather than stopping quietly. A task that spends 7 loops without progress is stopped as stuck.

The terminal interface drives an agent loop. The loop asks the model for a tool call, derives that call's side effects, asks the policy engine whether it is allowed, runs it through the execution layer, and feeds the result back. A separate verification collector watches the results.

What is not built in

MCP stdio support was removed and legacy [[mcp]] keys are ignored rather than silently half-working. Context7 is the only bundled documentation integration and no other MCP servers are included. Secret redaction is pattern-based, not exhaustive. Kite runs no telemetry and operates no shared provider account or credential proxy.

Found an error here? Open an issue.