kaos-control

Ideas to releases.
Without losing the plot.

A single Go binary that turns vague ideas into shipped, enterprise-grade releases — with AI agents, lineage tracking, and full privacy control. Locally. Affordably. Privately.

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Why kaos-control?

Every developer has felt the pain of great velocity without great discipline. kaos-control solves the part that agentic IDEs don't.

  • Full lifecycle in one tool

    Capture ideas, write requirements, plan, build, test, and release — all tracked as markdown artefacts in your git repo. Every line of shipped code traces back to the originating idea.

  • Unbreakable lineage

    Every artefact knows its parent. Defects link to features; features link to ideas; releases capture everything that fed into them. Never lose the thread between a requirement and the code that implements it.

  • Agents that stay in their lane

    Assign different models to different roles — Opus for requirements thinking, Sonnet for development, Haiku for test execution. Agents commit artefacts to git on every change. Humans stay in the loop through a configurable approval gate.

  • Privacy you control

    Run sensitive workloads on local models via Ollama. Route only public-tier work to hosted APIs. Air-gap the whole workflow on hardware you own. kaos-control is a single binary — pull the network cable and the lifecycle keeps going.

  • Predictable AI spend

    Per-role model configuration means you stop burning Opus tokens on work that Haiku can handle. The cost ratio is real: the difference between a sustainable bill and a panic.

How it works

Three things. That's the trick. Every piece of work is a feature idea, an enhancement, or a defect — and each walks a disciplined path from capture to release.

Diagram showing the kaos-control lifecycle: capture → requirements → planning → development → testing → release
The kaos-control lifecycle — from idea capture to release

Capture

Paste a raw idea — email, Slack message, shower thought — hit generate. The system classifies it, writes a proper artefact with acceptance criteria, and links it to related work it finds on the way through.

Requirements & Planning

Assign to a requirements analyst (agent or human). The analyst asks clarifying questions inline before writing the spec. A planner then produces separate backend, frontend, and test plans — each a linked artefact.

Development & Testing

Backend and frontend agents run in parallel, each committing to git on every logical change. The test developer writes cases against the test plan. A QA executor runs them; failures open defect artefacts automatically.

Release

Once a feature cluster is green — complete, tested, no open defects — drag it into the release in the 3D roadmap view. Every artefact, from the original idea forward, is in git and fully traceable.

kaos-control system overview diagram showing the web UI, Go server, SQLite index, git repository, and AI agent integrations
System overview — one binary, all the pieces

Download / Install

A single self-contained binary. No runtime dependencies. No Docker. No cloud account required to get started.

macOS

Apple Silicon & Intel

Download .tar.gz

Or install via Homebrew (tap coming soon):

brew install kcsinclair/tap/kaos-control

Linux

amd64 & arm64

Download .tar.gz

Or build from source:

go install github.com/kcsinclair/kaos-control/cmd/kaos-control@latest

Windows WSL

WSL2 (Ubuntu / Debian)

Download .tar.gz

Run inside WSL2 — the Linux binary works as-is.

Release binaries will be available on the GitHub Releases page once v1.0 ships. Until then, build from source — it takes about two minutes.

Getting started

From zero to a running lifecycle in under five minutes.

  1. 1. Build the binary

    git clone https://github.com/kcsinclair/kaos-control.git
cd kaos-control
make all          # builds web/dist + ./dist/kaos-control

  2. 2. Start the server

    ./dist/kaos-control

    On first launch kaos-control writes a default ~/.kaos-control/config.yaml and starts listening on :8042. Open http://localhost:8042.

  3. 3. Bootstrap a project

    cd /path/to/your/project
/path/to/dist/kaos-control init --owner-email you@example.com

    This creates the lifecycle/ directory tree, a skeleton lifecycle/config.yaml, and a CLAUDE.md to guide agent runs in your project.

  4. 4. Create your first idea

    Open the web UI, sign in, choose your project, and hit New Idea. Type two sentences. Hit generate. kaos-control handles the rest.

kaos-control roadmap view showing features clustered around releases in a 3D graph
3D roadmap view — drag features into releases visually

Community & Contributing

kaos-control is open-source under the GNU AGPLv3. Contributions are welcome — big or small.

Issues & Bug Reports Found a bug? Open an issue on GitHub. Contributing Guide Read the guide before your first PR. Licence (AGPLv3) Open-source with a network-use copyleft clause. Discussions Questions, ideas, and general chat.

The project uses the Developer Certificate of Origin — sign off every commit with git commit -s.