The full upstream README, mirrored here for reference. Install config, tool schemas, adoption signals, and an original overview live on the Knos listing page.
Check every claim on this page without installing anything: drexthealpha.github.io/Knos — the collision study, the twelve arms, the money gate and all eleven on-chain receipts, each number read live out of the JSON the scripts wrote.
One shared memory for every coding agent on your machine. Two agents, or two people, change the same thing without knowing it. Knos is the record of who is on what — and it refuses to answer about work somebody else has taken, and refuses the edit before the write lands.
From the repository: PyPI is the last cut
release and trails main.
Ninety seconds on a throwaway repo it deletes afterwards. A claim, a second agent refused, an edit blocked before the write, a purchase that costs nothing the second time, a reversed decision holding the work under it, a process that has never seen the repo reading it all back with its own pid and the commit hash on screen — and then the store is deleted and you watch every one of those stop.
Every line it prints is a real call into the real code. The evidence page is a page about the product, not part of it: nothing on the read path touches a network, and that is a test rather than a promise. There is no hosted knos, and there will not be one.
| Knos | |
|---|---|
| Listed in the MCP directory | yes — awesome-mcp-servers#13480, merged by the owner into a 94.5k-star index |
| Code merged by third-party maintainers | 2 — caura#1299, drt#1098; 6 more open, including repomix#1837 |
| Agents racing for one topic, real processes | 16, 0 double-grants in 128 attempts; 15 unshared — collide.json |
| Onchain receipts that resolve | 11 of 11, 8 on Base mainnet with USDC — python scripts/verify_receipts.py |
| Hold length learned per agent | 29% less time blocked on work nobody was doing — contention.json |
| Evidence regenerated on a clean machine | daily in public CI — last run reproduced every figure identically |
| Record of who overrode whom | chained per writer — test_seal.py edits the SQLite file and knos verify names the entry |
| Refusal that stops a filesystem write | yes — and renaming the file does not get past it, test_rename_bypass.py |
| Retained users | none. The full ledger, including 34 pull requests that failed |
The Action — zero install, never fails your build. It reads the
.knos/decisions.md a contributor commits and comments on a pull request that
touches claimed work. Drop this in .github/workflows/knos-claims.yml:
The library — if you already ship a tool, import the claim instead of running ours. No MCP, no CLI, no daemon:
The server — pip install knos && knos connect puts it in front of Claude
Code, Cursor, OpenCode and Claude Desktop, with three tools: search,
about, remember.
Everything. That is the point, and it is a test rather than a claim —
pytest tests/test_sibyl_is_load_bearing.py.
Delete memory.db and the withhold is gone, the edit is allowed, the paid
answer buys again, and the held decisions are released. There is no degraded
mode — there is no product.
The refusals themselves: pytest tests/test_intent.py tests/test_guard.py tests/test_rename_bypass.py. That the read path opens no socket:
pytest tests/test_no_network.py.
| Scoring this | docs/JUDGE_GUIDE.md — every claim mapped to the test that proves it |
| How it works | docs/ARCHITECTURE.md, docs/MEMORY_MODEL.md |
| Proof and receipts | docs/VERIFICATION.md |
| Who wants this, and who has not | docs/PMF.md |
| The long version of this page | docs/GUIDE.md |
Both optional, both off by default. Knos runs with them switched off and nothing on the read path touches a network.
Details and every hash: docs/VERIFICATION.md.
Every one of these is a read of the store that changes what happens next.
Delete memory.db and each line becomes the one after the arrow.
| the read | decides | without the store |
|---|---|---|
mcp._held | whether an agent is answered at all | it answers, and two agents edit the same thing |
guard.check | whether a file is written to disk | the write lands |
gate.decide | whether money moves | it buys the same answer again |
record.holds_for | how long the next claim survives | everyone is a stranger worth 30 minutes |
decide.is_suspect | whether work under a reversed decision is held | it proceeds on wording that was withdrawn |
seal.check | whether the record was edited | there is no record to check |
Every write and read into Sibyl is in one file, src/knos/memory.py, with
line numbers in the judge guide. The deletion test is
pytest tests/test_sibyl_is_load_bearing.py.
Knos is not a tool that happens to save things. Take Sibyl out and there is no product left to run.
The claim lives in the store, and that is the whole mechanism: one agent writes down what it is changing, and the next agent whose question touches that subject is handed the holder's name instead of an answer. The refusal is not a rule enforced somewhere else in the code — it is a read of the store, and it fails exactly when the read fails.
Three other things exist nowhere else: what you told it with knos remember,
the brief an agent paid for over x402 and wrote back, and the ACP job it sold.
Your commits and your CLAUDE.md are re-read after a delete. Those are not.
Knos is not a fork and not a clone. There is no upstream project and no pre-existing memory layer that Sibyl was added to. Every line is original work under MIT and the commit history is the whole record — written locally before the window and first published on 1 September; everything after is dated in the log.
Dependencies, and what each is for. Sibyl Memory (sibyl-memory-client)
is the store, and it is the load-bearing one. The MCP Python SDK provides the
server. universal-ctags is optional — without it knos falls back to a reader
it carries itself. The Virtuals ACP SDK and the x402 client are used only by
agent/, which is the commerce leg rather than the product.
The longer version of all three: docs/GUIDE.md.
It does not stop a determined person, and it is not access control. It knows what agents on this machine told it. It has no retained users. The ledger says so plainly, including the 34 pull requests that were the wrong idea.
MIT. The name is a Greek root for a thing known.