Kite

A minimal coding agent that runs in your terminal, built from scratch in Go.

What it can do (v0.1.0)

• Answer questions, and read the files in your project to answer them.
• List files, read files, and create new files in folders that already exist. It never overwrites or deletes.
• Split a bigger request into tasks, run them one by one, and check each one before moving on.
• Retry failed requests, stop at a limit, time out after a minute, and cancel with Esc.

It cannot run commands or edit existing files yet.

Getting started

You need Go 1.26 or newer and an API key for any OpenAI-compatible chat endpoint (the example uses Gemini).

git clone https://github.com/Prathamesh017/KITE.git
cd KITE
cp .env.example .env   # then put your API key in .env
go run ./cmd/main.go

With Task installed, you can use task run instead.

Using it

Type a question in the chat panel and press Enter.

Key	What it does
Enter	Send the question
Esc	Cancel the running question
ctrl+t	Switch theme
up / down	Scroll
ctrl+c	Quit

Try:

• what does cmd/main.go do?
• summarize main.go and write it to notes.md

Configuration

Set in .env (see .env.example):

Variable	Default	Meaning
API_KEY	required	Your API key
TEXT_MODEL_NAME	required	The model to use
API_URL	required	The chat-completions endpoint
REQUEST_TIMEOUT	60s	Time limit for one model request
MAX_RETRIES	3	Retries for a failed request
RETRY_INITIAL_DELAY / RETRY_MAX_DELAY	500ms / 8s	Backoff between retries
MAX_ITERATIONS	10	Model replies per question or task
MAX_TOOL_CALLS	20	Tool calls per question or task
MAX_TOOL_OUTPUT_BYTES	32768	Largest tool result sent to the model

Safety

• Kite only works inside the folder you start it in.
• read_file will not open .env, .env.*, *.pem, or anything under .git/.
• write_file only creates new files. Before a task run starts, Kite stops if any file the tasks would create already exists.

Development

task test    # run all tests
task debug   # run under Delve, then attach with "Attach to kite"