Kata

kata カタ

Local-first issue tracking for humans and coding agents.

kata gives agents a structured place to record tasks, decisions, links, comments, and state changes without turning GitHub Issues, markdown plans, or chat transcripts into the source of truth.

The CLI is built for agents and automation: stable commands, JSON output, and predictable failure modes. The TUI is built for people: browse, triage, edit, and supervise agent-written work without reading raw JSON. Both talk to the same local daemon and SQLite database.

Status: early public preview. The CLI, daemon, and TUI are usable, but command contracts and UI details may still change before a stable release.

What kata does today

What you can do:

• Track issues separately per project, with issue numbers that restart per project.
• Create, list, edit, close, reopen, comment, label, assign, and link issues.
• Search, idempotent-create, soft-delete, restore, and irreversibly purge.
• Browse and triage in a TUI (kata tui) over the same data.
• Stream state changes as durable events for polling, live tailing, hooks, and TUI updates.

How it's built:

• Workspace-to-project binding lives in .kata.toml, falling back to a git remote URL when no binding file exists.
• Data lives locally in SQLite under KATA_HOME behind a long-running daemon.
• Issues have stable ULID uid values in JSON; #N remains the project-scoped display label.
• kata export and kata import provide a git-friendly JSONL backup and schema cutover path.
• Successful commands emit JSON for reliable parsing by agents and scripts.

Goals

Three priorities:

• Agent ergonomics: stable commands, JSON-first workflows, explicit workspace binding, search-before-create, idempotency keys, and predictable exit codes.
• Human oversight: a TUI that helps people browse, triage, edit, and supervise agent activity without reading raw JSON.
• Auditability: append-only comments, event history, actor attribution, and explicit