klode

A klode — a rich vein — of grounded, verifiable knowledge, with the machinery to encode it and to supervise work against it. Every claim is anchored to a verbatim source and checked by a fail-closed linter, so the system can't quietly drift or hallucinate: cite, don't recall.

Zero runtime dependencies — Python 3.11+, standard library only.

The two loops

• Loop A — encode expertise (klode.lib): turn sources into cited, retrievable knowledge. Every card claim carries a verbatim (grep: …) anchor; klode check fails if any citation stops resolving.
• Loop B — supervise work (klode.gate): submit a draft, score it against criteria loaded from a knowledge base's craft layer, and return Go / Recycle — each cited defect grounded through klode.lib.verify, so the judge's citations are un-fakeable. The boundary is enforced: klode.gate consumes only the klode.lib public API, never its internals.

Install

pip install klode              # once published
# or from a source checkout:
pipx install -e .              # provides the `klode` and `klode-mcp` commands

Three surfaces over one engine

A knowledge base is a library.toml plus a corpus of cited cards. Point klode at one with -c, or register several in a manifest and address them by id (--kb <id> / --registry).

CLI — klode:

klode -c path/to/library.toml check                 # citation-rot linter (exit 1 on any broken citation)
klode -c path/to/library.toml search pacing         # retrieval over the cards
klode -c path/to/library.toml consult brevity       # read a craft lens
klode -c path/to/library.toml verify brevity "the exact quote"   # prove a quote against its source
klode ingest paper.pdf --shelf papers               # ingest a source -> clean, grep-ready text
klode kbs                                            # list the KBs in a registry

Add --json to any read verb for machine-readable output (the same structured result the MCP renders).

MCP server — klode-mcp (stdio): exposes the read/verify surface to an agent — list_kbs, search_sources, consult_dimension, consult_framework, zoom_card, verify_quote, diagnose, list_lenses. Serves one KB (-c) or many (--registry), and every grounded result names its KB.

Library — import klode.lib: the stable public-API facade — verify, search, consult, resolve, diagnose, Config. Cheap to import; pulls in no frontends or optional backends.

Ingestion — any format to grep-ready text

klode ingest detects the format by content signature (not the extension) and converges every source on one clean-text pipeline: PDF, EPUB, DOCX, HTML/XHTML, TXT. EPUB/DOCX/HTML/TXT are pure stdlib; only PDF's OCR tiers are optional. For table-heavy or scanned PDFs, point $KLODE_DOCLING_URL at a docling-serve endpoint (the GPU runs server-side — klode stays dependency-free) and pass --tier docling.

Architecture

One operations registry projects a single core to both surfaces (CLI + MCP), so they can differ in formatting but never in behaviour. Every grounded result carries structured provenance (which KB, which source, which policy). See dev-docs/ for the design record and SPEC-operations.md for the machine-readable operation table.

Status

0.2.1 — beta. The engine (klode.lib) is solid: 426 tests, a stable public-API facade, an AST layering guard, a content-sniffing multi-format ingester, and an MCP server, all with zero runtime dependencies. klode.gate (Loop B) is now a fail-closed supervising gate — freshness/review-aware grounding (verify_evidence), a bounded evidence-context op (verify_context), and an enriched, anchor-validated criterion schema are in place — but the rubric judge is still a stub (FixtureJudge); a real LLM judge plugs into the Judge protocol. The optional entailment check (klode check --entail) pulls a small NLI model behind klode[entail] and is advisory, warn-only.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.