kcapture

One knowledge-capture MCP + CLI, host-agnostic. When you reach a decision while reading code with an LLM, kcapture records it — by validating a capture manifest and forwarding it to kmint, the single deterministic writer. kcapture writes nothing itself; units are born SubmittedForRefinement and never auto-published (the host's tool-approval prompt is the human gate). kledger stays read-only.

This is the transport for the reverse-engineering.code source-type binding (ADR-KCM-FUNC-0003). The contract — the capture manifest — is owned by kmint (kmint/schemas/capture-manifest.v1.json); the vocabulary by the ADR catalogue (kmint source-types --json). kcapture keeps no copy of either.

Two faces, one core

• CLI — kcapture validate|record|list-source-types
• MCP (stdio) — kcapture serve-mcp exposes three tools: list_source_types, validate_manifest, record_capture.

Both are thin adapters over the same manifest validation + kmint shell-out.

Install into your AI host — one command

kcapture install --host <vendor> writes/updates that host's MCP config idempotently, launching the server via uvx --from <pin> kcapture serve-mcp (zero pre-install — the pin hides the proprietary index):

Add --dry-run to preview, --config-path P to target a specific file, --pin S to override the source uvx resolves. Adding a vendor = one row in kcapture/hosts.py + one sibling doc.

The single MCP, many vendors as siblings

There is exactly one host-agnostic capture MCP (kcapture/mcp_server.py). The per-vendor difference is small and parallel — config location, the mcpServers vs servers key, and the optional type: stdio. That difference is a table (kcapture/hosts.py), not a fork. A vendor graduates to its own repo only if its packaging becomes a genuinely separate published artefact (a VS Code Marketplace extension, a Gemini extension); then only that vendor's packaging splits, the core stays shared here.

Manifest, in one glance

{
  "sourceType": "reverse-engineering.code",
  "domain": "PAYMENTS",
  "source": { "kind": "code", "repoUrl": "…", "commit": "<full-sha>", "path": "src/pay.py" },
  "derivedFrom": [ { "kind": "llm-output", "text": "what the model said about the code" } ],
  "units": [ { "text": "the recovered decision, in one sentence" } ],
  "trigger": { "mode": "model-proposed", "by": "copilot:knowledge-capture@<model>", "at": "<ISO-8601>" }
}

• domain → the minted handle BNK.KNOW.MD.<DOMAIN>.<NNN>.
• derivedFrom is the two-capture case: the raw LLM output is captured as its own artefact DERIVED_FROM the code capture (FUNC-0003 R3) — provenance the human gate reviews.
• kmint derives provider + confidence and mints the handles; the manifest does not assign them.
• trigger.mode is mandatory and honest (URBA-0003 P5).

Dev

pip install -e ".[dev]"     # needs the pinned kmint installed too
pytest -q                   # unit + drift guard; the contract test skips unless KCAPTURE_CONTRACT=1

Run primarily as a local wheel + console script; the GHCR image exists for k-family parity only.