dcellison/kai

Kai

Kai is an AI agent, not a chatbot. It manages persistent agent subprocesses running on your hardware - Claude Code by default, with Goose, OpenAI Codex CLI, or OpenCode as alternative backends - and connects them to Telegram as a control surface. Shell, filesystem, git, web search, scheduling - the agent has real access to your system and can take real action on it. It reviews PRs when code is pushed, triages issues when they're opened, monitors conditions on a schedule, and operates across any project on your machine. Multiple users can share a single Kai instance, each with their own isolated subprocess, workspace, conversation history, and optional OS-level process separation.

For detailed guides on setup, architecture, and optional features, see the Wiki.

Architecture

Kai is two layers: an outer Python application that handles Telegram, HTTP, and scheduling, and one or more inner agent subprocesses that do the thinking and acting. The outer process programs against an AgentBackend ABC (backend.py), so it manages lifecycle, authentication, and transport identically regardless of which backend is running. Claude Code is the default; Goose ACP, OpenAI Codex CLI, and OpenCode ACP are alternatives. All four follow the same lifecycle: one subprocess per user, lazy creation, idle eviction. Resource usage scales with active users,