kgai Technical Report serieskgai.dev

Technical Reports

Reports on the design and implementation of kgai, an append-only decision log with deterministic graph projection for AI dev teams. August 2026.

TR-2026-01 · The Decision Event Model: Content-Addressed Records of Engineering Decisions

Engineering teams routinely lose the reasoning behind their own systems. Architecture decision records preserve some of it as prose, but prose has no machine-readable structure, no stable identity, and no defined behavior under concurrent authorship. We descri… [PDF]

TR-2026-02 · Total Order Without Coordination: Lamport Clocks and Content Hashes in a Multi-Writer Log

A decision log written by many independent machines and synchronized through an object store under the team's own control, with no coordinating server, must nevertheless replay identically on every machine. This requires a total order over events that every re… [PDF]

TR-2026-03 · Deterministic Projection: Deriving a Byte-Identical Graph from an Append-Only Log

kgai stores a team's engineering decisions as an append-only log of immutable, content-addressed events, and serves queries from a property graph derived from that log. This report describes the derivation. The log is the single source of truth. The graph is a… [PDF]

TR-2026-04 · Supersession Semantics: Decision Lifecycle in an Immutable Log

Engineering decision records are conventionally maintained by editing them in place, deleting them when they no longer apply, or expiring them through staleness heuristics. Each of these practices destroys information that teams and their AI agents later need.… [PDF]

TR-2026-05 · Deterministic Recall Without Embeddings

Retrieval layers for AI coding agents are dominated by embedding-based semantic search, which buys tolerance to paraphrase at the price of nondeterminism, model dependence, and operational weight. We describe the read path of kgai, a local-first memory of engi… [PDF]

TR-2026-06 · Conflict-Free Team Synchronization via Per-Writer Shards

Sharing a decision memory across a development team normally means either operating a server or merging files, and merging files means merge conflicts. We describe the synchronization design of kgai, a decision memory kept locally by AI-assisted development te… [PDF]

TR-2026-07 · Capture at the Write Boundary: Hook-Driven Decision Recording in Agentic Development

Software teams lose the rationale behind structural decisions because documentation is written after the fact, when the reasoning has already begun to fade. We describe the capture model of kgai, a local-first, immutable knowledge graph of engineering decision… [PDF]

TR-2026-08 · Trusting Repository-Supplied Configuration

A configuration file committed to a repository arrives on a developer's machine with git clone, authored by whoever created that repository. When a tool grants such a file authority, its keys become capabilities: a store path is a write capability, a sync dest… [PDF]

TR-2026-09 · Scale Characteristics of an Append-Only Decision Log

kgai records a software team's engineering decisions as an append-only, content-addressed log, split into one shard per writer and projected into a small live graph of domain elements. This report examines how that design behaves as the log grows. We summarize… [PDF]

TR-2026-10 · Scoping and Isolation in Shared Decision Stores

kgai stores a team's engineering decisions in an append-only log projected into a graph of domain elements. This report examines where the boundaries of such a store lie and what actually holds them. The default boundary is the repository, one store per projec… [PDF]

kgai is MIT open source at github.com/kgaidev/kgai.