Documentation
Kichma carries a product idea through its whole lifecycle — brief, market and product requirements, design, plan, tasks — as one linked graph. Every shipped task traces back through the requirement it implements to the need that justified it, and progress is read from merged pull requests rather than asserted by anyone.
These pages document the parts you drive yourself: the command-line tool, how to point a coding agent at a project, and the data model underneath both. You do not need an account to read any of it.
Install the CLI
The CLI is published to npm as kichma. Run it with npx and nothing is installed:
npx -y kichma@1 loginlogin starts a device-code flow: the terminal prints a short code, you approve it in a browser, and the credential lands in ~/.kichma. The @1 is deliberate — it pins the frozen v1 command grammar, so a script, a CI job or an AGENTS.md that calls the CLI keeps working across releases rather than meeting a changed command surface mid-task.
Prefer to have it on your PATH? npm i -g kichma@1 installs it once and the examples below run as written. Either way is fine — npx is the better default for a machine you do not own and for anything automated, because there is no install step to have skipped.
Commands connect to kichma.ai unless --url or KICHMA_URL names another instance.
A first session
From inside a repo connected to a project, three commands cover most of a working day:
kichma context # what this project is, and what's in flightkichma tasks --available # what you can claim, rankedkichma pickup T-42 # claim it, cut the branch, print the briefScope follows your checkout: inside a connected repo, commands narrow to that project; outside one, they span your org. Every command takes --json, which carries exactly the same facts as the plain form — the CLI reference has the rest.
Where to go next
- CLI referenceEvery command, flag and worked example — generated from the same table the terminal help prints, so the two cannot disagree.
- Pointing an agent at KichmaGive a coding agent the brief, the Why-trace and a definition of done it did not have to guess — over the CLI or the HTTP API.
- The entity and edge modelThe six entity types, the eleven edge types, the three axes and the seam law — the data model everything else is a view of.