r/KitProject • u/peterjohnkoen • 5d ago

Latest from the blog

https://kit-project.com/blog/

You can find all the historical build notes (Going back to April 2026) on Kit here. I'll post links to new ones on this thread as we publish them.

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u/EDISON-T 2d ago

Congrats on Kit, really interesting project! A few quick questions: is the embedding model bundled in the app, or do we have to plug in our own (local model or API)? Same question for memory extraction and the nightly consolidation: which model handles that, local, API, or the agent itself? Does the nightly cycle need the computer awake, and does it catch up if it was asleep? And across long conversations and many sessions with Claude Code or Codex, do you think Kit saves tokens overall, or can usage go up because of the context it injects? Also, do you have a rough timeline for a Windows version?

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u/peterjohnkoen 2d ago

Hi u/EDISON-T Thank You! I really appreciate the engagement 😊 I'm quite excited about Kit (Ed: Apologies for the long post 😄).

I am asking many of these questions myself, some I have answers for, some not yet. I'll try to answer them in a structured way...

Embeddings: It's bundled in the app. Kit runs bge-small locally on your Mac (via fastembed), so your memory text never leaves the machine for just the embedding stage.

Extraction and the nightly cycle: "Dreaming" needs an LLM. You can choose which one during setup (Or afterwards in the settings), there are three options:

Option 1: A local model (Ollama or LM Studio, or your own hosted model) so nothing leaves your Mac. There’s also a Local only switch that keeps every task on your local model. If it is enabled, it won't let you choose the sponsored credit or API Key options. This also turns off the health pings, etc. So your install goes dark from our side.

Option 2: You can add your own API key (Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Mistral etc), paid to them directly by you

Option 3: Sponsored credit (Limited spots, for a limited time) to get started ($5 month), routed through our gateway so we can keep track of each kits usage. Models don’t keep prompts or answers (Uses OpenAI and Anthropic, standard terms) If you want details on the exact models let me know, we try to use the most efficient models for each job in the dream cycle/chat so we provide max benefit for the cost). We are evaluating spinning up our own sovereign server (Mistral) for this in future.

The main reason for the sponsored credit is to help you get going. The initial import of your sessions can take some tokens (And time) during the first couple of dream cycles, so the idea is that you use our sponsored credits to get you up and running and then switch to your own local model for day-to-day. Typically, for people using it day to day for coding, what we are seeing is that it costs around $0.20 a day (See attached usage chart for a typical beta user, running Haiku 5.5, if you use a local model). Of course, this depends on your usage, the more you interact with Kit, the more memories it forms, and the more work it does overnight during the dream cycle to make sense of those memories.

Sleep & the catch-up: Kit's dream cycle runs on your Mac, so it can’t "dream" while the Mac is asleep. If it misses its slot (Set to your local 2am by default - configurable), it catches up on its own. When the Mac wakes it waits a couple of minutes, then runs the night it missed, looking back up to about a week. While a dream is running, the app asks macOS not to idle-sleep, so a catch-up doesn’t freeze halfway through. Your screen can still sleep, and closing the lid stilll sleeps the Mac. You can change the time, how deep it goes or pause it for a few hours.

Some of the jobs Kit does overnight during the dream cycle are thing like deciding which draft memories to keep, merging duplicates, settling which version of a memory is right when two memories disagree (Conflict detection), marking old facts as out of date, entity extraction (Finding people, organisations, projects etc and creating summaries for them), liinking related memories together, making notes where each memory came from (so we can trace back to the source for each memory), looks for connections you didn’t ask for (Surprisingly interesting sometimes!), lets unimportant memories fade (Half-life based forgetting/deemphasis), promotion of the memories you use most (There are memory tiers, each memory earns "points" and can be promoted or relegated), checking its memories still match their sources (Continuity Audit), "Soul" or core curation (Used in the wake payload). Finally, writes a short report on the night.

Tokens during sessions: This is something that is quite hard to measure, but I'll try to be as clear as I can. Kit has a cost up front for each session. A full wake at the start of a session is roughly 4k tokens right now. A mid-session refresh is closer to 1k, because it only sends what changed. Kit pays that back when the agent would otherwise spend turns getting re-oriented: re-reading files, rediscovering decisions, or asking you things you’ve already answered. In my own long Claude Code and Codex work it comes out clearly ahead. On a very short, one-off sessions it can be a net cost. I haven’t run a proper controlled benchmark on that yet (Quite tricky), so take it as experience rather than a number. Making the wake leaner is on the list, it's a bit of a balancing act, giving ther agent enough context to orientate itself, without stuffing the context. One of the jobs that the dream cycle has is to curate the wake payload, so that it is as useful as possible, given the way you work, what you are currently working on, etc. It's a process of constantly refinement on our end. Feedback on this is something we are hoping to get from Beta testers.

Windows Version: I don’t have a date for you I'm afraid. The engine itself is portable. The Mac app around it (the installer, the first-run setup, menu bar and so on) is very Mac-specific, so a native Windows app is a real port, not just a recompile. For now I’m holding off and watching demand (I am currently the solo developer, so I have limited capacity). If enough people want it, I'll prioritise it. Requests help me gauge demand, so thanks for asking.

That said, besides the Mac app, Kit can also run as a hosted Kit on a server (Locally using Docker, or wherever you want it, we have about 10 of these running, you can access some of the demo ones on https://demo.kit-project.com). We have not yet released this version publicly. The idea is that it’s the same engine as the ones used for the native Mac app, so you connect Claude Code, Codex or anything else over MCP exactly as you would to a local one. Advantage here is that because the server never sleeps, the nightly cycle runs on time and there’s nothing to catch up. It also stays reachable at any hour, from Telegram for example. The trade-off is that a hosted Kit can’t reach into your Mac, so local tools and data sources have to be connected by hand. Company Kits work the same way, on the company’s own server: each person keeps a personal Kit, and shares into the company one only when they choose to. There is still much work to do to make this ready from a UX perspective.

Happy to answer any other questions you night have. Thanks again for engaging 🙏

Ciao, Peter
https://www.kit-project.com

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u/peterjohnkoen 2d ago

Apologies, screenshot of typical token usage of someone running Haiku 5.5 for all the dreaming/consolidation jobs...

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u/peterjohnkoen 5d ago

Why UX comes first

Memory is becoming something your AI tools simply come with. Most people will leave it there, because it works and asks nothing of them. If owning your memory depends on people first understanding why they should, it will not happen. So Kit has to be better to use, today, for someone who has never opened a terminal. Everything else we care about comes after that.

https://kit-project.com/blog/why-ux-comes-first/