KaaS — Knowledge as a Service

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Turn scattered notes, documents, and transcripts into a searchable, queryable personal Wiki — powered by LLM-driven knowledge compilation.

Why We Built This

KaaS started as an internal tool. Our knowledge lived scattered across documents, meetings, and email — and every time someone changed roles or left, the context they'd built up walked out with them. New people spent weeks piecing it back together.

A distillation pipeline fixed that. It compiles each person's scattered material into a wiki tied to their role rather than their identity — so when someone moves on, the raw data goes but the distilled judgment stays for whoever fills the seat next.

The payoff is the same either way: the organization stops re-answering the same questions. That's what convinced us it was worth open-sourcing.

What Makes This Different

Unlike typical RAG systems that chunk and embed raw text, KaaS compiles your content through a 4-phase LLM pipeline:

Raw Content → Extract → Classify → Write → Index → Structured Wiki

The result is human-readable Markdown articles — not a black-box vector store. You can read, edit, and git-manage your knowledge base.

Quick Start with your AI agent

Already living in a coding agent (Claude Code, Codex, openclaw, …)? Skip Docker. Copy this and paste it to your agent — it will install kb-ai, ask what to distill, build the wiki, and wire up MCP so you can query it in any later session:

Set up KaaS to build a queryable knowledge base from my files.
Fetch https://raw.githubusercontent.com/bybit-exchange/kaas/main/docs/agent-quickstart.md
and follow it exactly.

Prefer a web UI, or want the full backend? Use the Docker path below.

Quick Start

KaaS calls LLMs through any OpenAI-compatible API (OpenAI, DeepSeek, Ollama, vLLM, Azure OpenAI, etc.). Pick either method below:

Option A: Docker

# Build the image
docker build -t kaas .

# Run
docker run -d --name kaas \
  -p 8080:8080 \
  -v ./data:/app/data \
  -e LLM_API_KEY=sk-xxx \
  -e LLM_BASE_URL=https://api.openai.com/v1 \
  -e LLM_MODEL=gpt-4o-mini \
  kaas

Option B: CLI Install

# Install (Linux/macOS, amd64/arm64)
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/bybit-exchange/kaas/main/install.sh | sh

# Start the service
export LLM_API_KEY="sk-xxx"                         # OpenAI-compatible API key
export LLM_BASE_URL="https://api.openai.com/v1"     # API endpoint
export LLM_MODEL="gpt-4o-mini"                      # Model name
kaas serve                                          # Default: http://localhost:8080

Supported platforms: Linux/macOS, amd64/arm64. Uninstall: rm -rf ~/.local/share/kaas ~/.local/bin/kaas.

LLM_BASE_URL defaults to https://api.openai.com/v1 and LLM_MODEL defaults to gpt-4o-mini. Change them to point at any OpenAI-compatible endpoint.

Open http://localhost:8080.

Enable remote MCP (optional)

To let Claude Code or other MCP clients connect to the knowledge base:

docker run -d --name kaas \
  -p 8080:8080 \
  -v ./data:/app/data \
  -e LLM_API_KEY=sk-xxx \
  -e KAAS_MCP_ENABLED=true \
  -e KAAS_MCP_TOKEN=your-secret-token \
  kaas

MCP client URL: http://<host>:8080/mcp, Authorization: Bearer your-secret-token.

Or run locally:

make dev

Architecture

The Go backend spawns the Python AI engine as a long-running daemon process, communicating via a multiplexed stdin/stdout protocol. A single Docker image bundles everything — no sidecar containers needed.

Features

• 4-Phase Compile Pipeline: Extract concepts/entities/decisions → Classify into articles → Write/merge Markdown → Update markdown indexes
• Worker Acceleration: Concurrent extract/pipeline workers, circuit breaker, lease recovery
• Streaming Chat: SSE streaming with source citations pointing back to wiki articles
• Multiple Input Sources: Paste text, upload files, or provide URLs
• Incremental Compilation: Only recompiles new/changed content
• Git-Friendly Output: All wiki articles are plain Markdown
• MCP Access: Query the compiled wiki from any MCP-capable coding agent via an ask tool

MCP Access

Expose the compiled wiki to any Model Context Protocol client (Claude Code, Codex, openclaw, …) through a single ask tool — ask(query, paths?, model?) returns a cited Markdown answer grounded in the wiki. Two transports:

stdio (local — the agent spawns the server, fully self-contained):

# The agent launches this; set KAAS_KB_DIR to the knowledge-base root and
# the LLM_* credentials in the environment.
kb-ai mcp                       # stdio is the default transport

# Claude Code:
claude mcp add kaas -- kb-ai mcp

For Codex / openclaw, add a stdio MCP server with command kb-ai mcp and env KAAS_KB_DIR + LLM_*.

streamable-http (remote — published through the backend's :8080 origin):

Run the container with KAAS_MCP_ENABLED=true (see Quick Start). The backend exposes the MCP endpoint at /mcp. Point a remote agent at it:

# Claude Code:
claude mcp add --transport http kaas http://host:8080/mcp

Set KAAS_MCP_TOKEN to require Authorization: Bearer <token> on the HTTP transport (off by default — local/intranet assumption). stdio has no network surface and is unauthenticated.

Configuration

All configuration lives in etc/kaas.toml. Copy and edit it:

[llm]
api_key = "sk-..."
base_url = "https://api.openai.com/v1"
model = "gpt-4o-mini"

[ai.mcp]
enabled = false          # set true to expose /mcp endpoint
token = ""               # bearer token for MCP auth (empty = no auth)
timeout_sec = 120        # tools/call timeout

With Docker, pass secrets as environment variables — they override the TOML at startup:

Development

The quickest way to start all services locally:

# First time: create your local config (not tracked by git)
cp etc/kaas.toml etc/kaas-dev.toml
# Edit etc/kaas-dev.toml — set your LLM credentials:
#   [llm]
#   api_key = "sk-..."
#   base_url = "https://api.openai.com/v1"   # or your preferred endpoint
#   model = "gpt-4o-mini"

make dev

This launches the Go backend (which auto-spawns the Python AI daemon) and the Vite dev server together.

To run components individually:

# Backend (spawns Python daemon automatically)
go run ./cmd/kaas -f etc/kaas.toml

# Frontend (hot-reload)
cd web && pnpm dev

# MCP server (stdio — for local agent integration)
cd py && KAAS_KB_DIR=./data uv run kb-ai mcp

# Tests
make test

Contributing

Contributions are welcome — see CONTRIBUTING.md for dev setup, how to run the tests, and commit conventions.

Acknowledgments

The core idea — compiling knowledge into a persistent, interlinked wiki that compounds over time instead of re-deriving answers via RAG on each query — was inspired by Andrej Karpathy's "LLM Wiki" gist. Thanks for the clear articulation of the pattern.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.