🪁 Kite (kt)

Zero-thought continuous synthesis version control.

Most Git tools are just wrappers. They put a colorful UI over the same old mental model: staging files, writing WIP commits, and managing branch state.

Kite abandons manual versioning entirely. You write the code. Kite writes the history.

It acts as an instantaneous quicksave while you are in the flow state, and intelligently synthesizes your messy saves into a pristine, semantic Git history only when you are ready to share it.

The Paradigm: Quicksaves and Landing

As a power user, your workflow is binary: you are either in the zone, or you are delivering. Kite isolates these two states completely.

1. In the Zone: The Quicksave

When you are coding, you don't stage files. You don't write commit messages. You just type:

kt

That’s it. By default, Kite instantly stages everything and creates a silent snapshot ([kite] save 14:02). It executes in milliseconds. You literally cannot lose work, and your flow state is never broken.

If you have already staged a specific subset yourself, Kite respects that selection and quicksaves only the staged changes. That path is there for deliberate exceptions; the normal recommended workflow is still to let Kite capture everything for you.

Quicksaves intentionally skip Git hooks to stay instant. Landing commits use normal git commit behavior, so your repository's configured Git hooks still run before polished history is written.

2. Delivering: Semantic Auto-Staging

When you are done with a feature, your history is full of messy quicksaves. You type:

kt land

Kite does not just squash your commits. It rewinds your quicksaves, analyzes the total diff of what you built, and uses local AI to logically group your changed files.

It automatically stages specific files together and writes atomic, Conventional Commits for each logical group:

• feat(api): add stripe webhook endpoints (contains the 3 backend files)
• feat(ui): build checkout modal component (contains the 5 frontend files)

Zero thought. Perfect history. No errors.

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Installation

Ensure you have Rust installed, then build and install the binary globally:

git clone https://github.com/binbandit/kite.git kite
cd kite
cargo install --path .

Install The Agent Skill

This repo also ships an installable agent skill at skills/use-kite.

Install it from GitHub with the skills CLI:

npx skills add https://github.com/binbandit/kite --skill use-kite

Install it specifically for Codex:

npx skills add https://github.com/binbandit/kite --skill use-kite -a codex

Install it globally so it is available across projects:

npx skills add https://github.com/binbandit/kite --skill use-kite -a codex -g

If you are testing from a local checkout, install from the current directory instead:

npx skills add . --skill use-kite -a codex

Usage

kt go <idea>

Starts a new flow. Pulls the latest default branch, cuts a new feature branch, and gets out of your way.

kt go stripe-webhooks

kt (Save)

The zero-friction quicksave. Run this constantly while you work. It captures all tracked and untracked changes instantly.

kt

kt land

Synthesizes your quicksaves into a pristine history and force-pushes to your remote.

kt land

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Configuration & AI Providers

Kite uses a Local-First architecture with graceful cloud degradation. It will never block you.

1. Local First (Recommended) For zero-latency, private synthesis, install Ollama and pull a lightweight model like llama3. Kite will automatically detect and use it.

export KITE_LOCAL_MODEL="llama3" # Default

2. Cloud Fallback (OpenAI) If your local model is offline, Kite seamlessly falls back to OpenAI.

export OPENAI_API_KEY="sk-..."
export KITE_OPENAI_MODEL="gpt-5-mini"

Kite reads the OpenAI model from KITE_OPENAI_MODEL or OPENAI_MODEL. If neither is set, it defaults to gpt-5-nano.

3. Manual Fallback If you have no internet and no local model, Kite instantly drops you into a minimal manual prompt. You are never blocked from landing your code.

Why Kite is Safe

Kite is built to be utterly bulletproof:

• Branch Agnostic: Kite uses a contiguous log walker. When you run kt land, it only rewinds continuous [kite] save commits. It will never overwrite a coworker's commits or touch your pre-existing history.
• No Lost Files: Even if the AI hallucinates, Kite cross-references the AI's output with your actual changed files. If the AI misses a file, Kite sweeps it up into a fallback commit. Absolutely no code is ever lost or left behind.

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Built for developers who just want to write code.