Kenn Software: local-first agent tooling suite

Kenn Software (kenn.io, tagline "development and knowledge systems for the agentic era") ships a small family of tools that all look the same from a distance: a single Go binary, local-first, SQLite under the hood, no account or telemetry, a CLI shaped for agents and a TUI shaped for the human watching them. Five of them, covering different points of the agent-assisted-development loop.

The five tools

• kata — issue tracker. A local SQLite daemon with an agent CLI and a human TUI; issue state lives outside the repo (only a .kata.toml is committed). The durable task ledger an agent records against. (210★, early preview — watchlist)
• middleman — PR/issue dashboard. Syncs GitHub/GitLab/Forgejo/Gitea data into local SQLite and serves a Svelte UI; unified activity timeline, inline diffs, a local kanban, merge/approve from the UI. For triaging other people's PRs. (110★, no release yet)
• agentsview — session analytics. Full-text search, cost tracking (a 100×-faster ccusage replacement), and stats across 50+ agents. The volume-and-cost ledger. (~4.5k★ — the mature one)
• roborev — continuous code review. A post-commit hook reviews every commit in the background and can auto-fix in isolated worktrees. The output-quality ledger. (1.2k★, v0.55)
• msgvault — email/chat archival. Gmail/IMAP/MBOX/.emlx into SQLite + DuckDB; offline FTS and vector search, MCP server. The personal-data member, not an agent-workflow tool. (1.8k★, v0.14 alpha — watchlist)

The shared design DNA

The reason these belong on one page is that they make the same bets, and the bets are the interesting part:

• Single binary, local-first. Everything runs on your machine. Servers bind to 127.0.0.1 by default. No hosted service, no accounts, no telemetry beyond an optional update check.
• SQLite as the substrate, often with a second engine for what SQLite is bad at — DuckDB + Parquet in msgvault for OLAP aggregates, FTS5 across agentsview/msgvault for search. middleman uses the pure-Go modernc.org/sqlite driver to avoid CGO; agentsview and msgvault take the CGO/static-linking cost where they need FTS5 or DuckDB.
• CLI for agents, TUI for humans. Stable commands with JSON output and predictable failure modes on one side; vim-keyed interactive browsing on the other. kata states this split explicitly; the others follow it.
• Speed via pre-indexing. agentsview's headline claim — 100× faster than re-parsing session JSONL on every run — is the same instinct behind msgvault's DuckDB cache: index once, query in milliseconds.
• Optional Postgres for teams. Both agentsview and roborev let you push local data to a shared Postgres for team dashboards, while staying single-user-local by default.
• Go 1.25/1.26, MIT. Same toolchain and license across the board.

Where they sit relative to other wiki tools

The suite overlaps deliberately with tools already tracked here, and the contrasts are sharper than the similarities:

• kata vs. beads — both give agents a structured task graph instead of a markdown TODO, but opposite storage philosophies. Beads commits a Dolt database into the repo for branch-merged issues; kata keeps SQLite outside the repo for a clean footprint. Pick by whether you want issue history versioned with code.
• middleman vs. forge — same set of forges (GitHub/GitLab/Gitea/Forgejo). forge is the scripting/agent CLI bridge; middleman is the human review surface.
• roborev vs. charlie-daemons / re_gent — roborev is the commit-triggered, review-shaped case of "agent runs in the background"; re_gent attacks the same "accountability for generated code" goal through per-prompt provenance instead of review.
• agentsview vs. ctx — ctx organizes and binds agent conversations; agentsview analyzes and prices them.
• msgvault vs. wacli — same "own your message history offline" instinct, different source (email vs. WhatsApp).

The through-line worth keeping: this is one vendor betting that the tooling around coding agents should be local single binaries you own, not SaaS dashboards — and shipping enough of them (issues, PRs, cost, review, personal data) to make the bet legible.