Koinome

Koinome is a local-first, plain-Markdown system for creating and maintaining a personal knowledge corpus for a person and their AI agents, with a deterministic validation gate.

Koinome is the product and tooling. A corpus is a portable, governed body of knowledge maintained by an individual and usable by that individual and their authorised AI agents. The koinome command creates and maintains corpora.

Koinome currently provides a complete local-first corpus for individual use.

The individual corpus and its local tooling are free and open-source and are intended to remain so.

Current scope

The current Koinome release manages individual corpora, one corpus at a time. Cross-corpus sharing, transfer, combination, and federation are not implemented.

Free and open-source commitment

Koinome for individual use is a complete local-first product, not a limited edition of a hosted service. The individual corpus format, local tooling, validation, agent workflows, imports, exports, synthesis, migration, synchronisation, backup, and recovery are free and open-source and are intended to remain so.

You can create, maintain, and use local corpora without a Koinome account, subscription, or hosted service.

The problem

AI agents are amnesiac. Every session starts from zero, so context, decisions, and durable facts evaporate between sessions.

Judge any fix with the turn-it-off test: delete the tooling. With Koinome, delete every script and the corpus still works — notes open in any editor, git still diffs them, grep still finds them.

Memory corruption compounds quietly. For work knowledge, decisions, and governance records, the rule is absolute: nothing rewrites authoritative knowledge while you sleep.

The idea

The files are the product. Three commitments follow:

1. Open standards only. CommonMark, YAML frontmatter, git, and todo.txt. Any human or agent can read a corpus with no adapter.
2. Governed, not free-form. Deterministic validation and an optional git hook enforce the corpus contract. AI assists around the gate, never inside it.
3. Authored, not compiled. Derived synthesis pages cite sources and pass the same gate as authored notes.

Guarantees

1. Every note opens as plain text with no Koinome tooling installed.
2. Validation is deterministic. No model, no network, no server.
3. AI assists around the gate, never inside it. With every agent offline you can still read, write, validate, and commit.
4. No Koinome process rewrites your notes unattended. The optional scheduled job is git sync only.
5. Derived pages cite their sources. The validator rejects synthesis without provenance.
6. Sensitive boundaries are physical. Keep sensitive material in a separate private corpus on a path no agent reaches.

Quick start

# run in place, no install
./koinome-cli new

# or install the command
pipx install .        # or: uv tool install .
koinome new

Interactive, or fully scriptable:

koinome new --name my-work --path ~/my-work

Or pass domains when the layout is already known:

koinome new --name my-work --path ~/my-work \
  --domain 10-projects=projects \
  --domain 20-governance=governance

This creates the corpus, installs the git hook, and sets up shared folders. Point your agent at it and run the koinome-init skill to finish setup. Requires Python 3.10+ and PyYAML.

End-to-end individual workflow

1. Install — uv tool install . or run ./koinome-cli.
2. Create a corpus — koinome new --name my-corpus --path ~/my-corpus.
3. Connect an agent — open the corpus in Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI, or Cursor; run koinome-init.
4. Author or import — add notes, import exports with koinome seed, or distill seeds with koinome-distill-seeds.
5. Validate — koinome doctor ~/my-corpus or python3 .scripts/validate_corpus.py --all inside the corpus.
6. Retrieve and synthesise — use MOCs, grep, and koinome-synthesize for provenance-backed synthesis.
7. Synchronise — commit and push with git; optional koinome_sync.py for automated sync.
8. Upgrade safely — koinome upgrade ~/my-corpus refreshes managed tooling without touching your notes.
9. Recover — roll back from .koinome/backups/ or git history; validation failures block bad commits.
10. Remove tooling — delete Koinome scripts; your Markdown and git history remain.

Commands

See docs/USAGE.md for full reference.

Migrating from AuxMem

If you have an existing AuxMem folder, run koinome upgrade — see docs/MIGRATION.md.

Licence

MIT — see LICENSE.