Kairos

Kairos is Flight Levels work management: strategy, initiatives and delivery on boards that connect to each other, with an agent-facing surface so machines can do the work alongside people. It ships as one stateless binary serving the GUI, the REST API, MCP and SCIM — against a PostgreSQL and an OIDC issuer you bring. Kairos is Apache-2.0 licensed.

Where to go

This book is organised by what you are doing right now, not by feature. The four sections answer four different questions:

• Tutorials — you have not used Kairos and want to see it work. Start here; the lesson is meant to be followed start to finish.
• How-to guides — you have a goal and need the sequence. Grouped by whether you are running Kairos, doing work in it, or wiring an agent up to it.
• Reference — you need a fact and need to trust it. Commands, configuration, MCP tools, endpoints, capabilities, errors, vocabulary.
• Explanation — you want to understand why Kairos is shaped this way. Read at leisure, not mid-task.

If you are not sure, the glossary is a good first stop. Kairos has a few words that mean more than one thing — “archived” most of all — and knowing which is which saves time later.

What this book does not cover

Contributing to Kairos. Documentation for people changing the code lives beside the code it describes, which is where you will already be looking:

• README.md — clone, build, test
• uat/README.md — the user-acceptance journeys
• e2e/README.md — the end-to-end smoke
• docs/gui-conventions.md — GUI conventions
• plugin/README.md — the Claude Code plugin

That is a deliberate boundary rather than a gap: this book serves operators, the people doing the work, and agent authors. “Contributor” is an audience rather than a kind of documentation, and those files are more useful next to the code than collected here.

Licence

Apache License 2.0. LICENSE and NOTICE are at the root of the repository, in every CLI tarball, and inside the image at /usr/share/doc/kairos/.