Lifecycle & Lineage
Every artefact shares a lineage slug and a monotonic index across stages. Every deployed line of code traces to the original idea, with nothing lost between capture and release.
Open-source lifecycle management
kaos-control
Turn ideas into shipped, enterprise-grade releases — without losing the plot, blowing your token budget, or leaking your code to a third party.
A single Go binary that walks every idea through capture, requirements, planning, code, tests, and release as markdown artefacts in a git repo. You choose which AI model runs each role — controlling costs and keeping sensitive code on your own hardware.
Walkthrough
Watch the Demo
A short walkthrough — setting up kaos-control, adding a project, and building a website end-to-end.
Why this exists
The Problem
The constraint isn't ideas — it's the structure to act on them. Agentic IDEs write code brilliantly but leave the hard questions unanswered: where ideas come from and how they're captured, how requirements get planned and assigned, how releases get cut and traced back to the original ask.
Two invisible costs compound the chaos. Token spend is opaque — you know you're burning money, but not on what. And every prompt you send to a hosted model is a piece of your product leaving your machine: architectural decisions, schemas, the quiet competitive moat that serious software lives in.
The bottleneck shifted. It stopped being "can the code get written?" and became "do I know what I'm asking for?" and "where is my code going while it's being written?" kaos-control was built to answer both questions at once.
What it is
Overview
kaos-control is a single Go binary — around 250 MB — with an embedded web UI, SQLite for indexing, and flat markdown files with YAML frontmatter as the source of truth. Run it on your laptop, a Linux box, or a tmux session you SSH into from anywhere.
Every piece of work is an idea, an enhancement, or a defect. Each walks configurable stages — capture, requirements, planning, development, tests, release — producing a markdown artefact at every step. The artefacts live in git. Lineage links every deployed line of code back to the original idea that asked for it.
Roles — requirements analyst, planner, developer, QA — are played by agents or humans interchangeably. The role contract is the same either way: produce the artefact. If it isn't written down, it didn't happen.
What's included
Features
Agents per Role
Requirements analyst, planner, frontend developer, backend developer, QA. Assign Claude Code, Ollama, or a human to any role. Roles are interchangeable; the artefact contract stays the same.
Cost & Privacy Levers
Configure a different model per role. Opus where thinking quality dominates; Haiku for QA and test execution; local Ollama for code that should never leave your machine. Token spend is logged per run.
Visualisation
3D force graph, 2D Cytoscape graph, Kanban board, Gantt chart, and roadmap view over the same artefact data. The blocked column is the human work queue — anything there needs a person.
DevOps Pipelines
Declarative YAML pipelines in your project's lifecycle directory. Trigger build, deploy, and release sequences from the UI. Per-step output streams to the browser over WebSocket. Role-gated.
Local-First & Open Source
One binary. No SaaS, no phone-home, no required cloud account. Your artefacts live in your git repo. Pull the network cable and the workflow keeps going. Released under AGPLv3.
The lifecycle
How It Works
An idea enters as a rough sentence — in your own voice. kaos-control classifies it, generates a proper artefact with a lineage slug, and links it to related work it finds on the way through.
Capture
Paste a vague email or a one-liner. The system generates a proper idea artefact and links it to related work.
Requirements & Planning
The requirements analyst clarifies scope; the planner produces backend, frontend, and test plans — each as a linked artefact.
Develop & Release
Developers implement in parallel; defects raise artefacts automatically. When the artefact cluster is green, move the feature into a release with a click.
See it in action
Roadmap
kaos-control's own roadmap lives inside the running app and is dogfooded daily. Features cluster around the releases they belong to; unscheduled work waits in the backlog. Same artefacts, multiple lenses.
Who it's built for
Who It's For
Lead Developers
Introduce agents into a real team workflow without giving up code review, tests, release discipline, or the option to keep sensitive code off third-party servers.
CTOs & Tech Leaders
Read documents and approve things rather than tinkering with an AI IDE.
The discipline is encoded in CLAUDE.md; you inherit it by
opening the project.
Founders & Entrepreneurs
Running a one-person dev shop? kaos-control gives you the structure to track what you've already built and plan what comes next without losing your mind.
Product Managers & Owners
Capture vague ideas faithfully, produce traceable artefacts, and show stakeholders exactly what's in each release and where every feature came from.
Ready to ship?
Get Started
Pre-built single-binary archives are published on GitHub Releases for macOS (Intel + Apple Silicon), Linux (x86-64 + arm64), and Windows (x86-64). Download, unzip, and run.
# Download the archive for your platform (replace VERSION and PLATFORM as needed)
VERSION=0.1.2
curl -L -o kaos-control.zip \
https://github.com/kcsinclair/kaos-control/releases/download/v${VERSION}/kaos-control-${VERSION}-darwin-arm64.zip
unzip kaos-control.zip
./kaos-control-${VERSION}/kaos-controlSee the README for platform-specific steps, checksum verification, and first-run setup.
Available under the GNU AGPLv3 licence. Commercial licence available on request.