Knos

Check every claim on this page without installing anything: drexthealpha.github.io/Knos — the collision study, the eight arms, the money gate and all twelve 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.

See it in one command

pip install "git+https://github.com/drexthealpha/Knos"
knos demo

From the repository: PyPI is the last cut release and trails main.

Fifty 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.

Signals

	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	3 merged, 5 still open — the list
Agents racing for one topic, real processes	16, 0 double-grants in 128 attempts; 15 unshared — collide.json
Onchain receipts that resolve	12 of 12, 9 on Base mainnet with USDC — knos receipts
Money spent on work that got dropped	$0.044 to $0.000 — the gate reads who is asking, budget.json
Hold length learned per agent	29% less time blocked — 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 — knos verify names an edited entry
A rule deleted from CLAUDE.md	stops being quoted — test_fresh_rules.py
Refusal that stops a filesystem write	yes, and renaming the file does not get past it
Retained users	none. The full ledger, including 34 pull requests that failed

Three ways in, none of them a server

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:

on: [pull_request]
jobs:
  claims:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - uses: drexthealpha/Knos/action@v0.1.8

The library — if you already ship a tool, import the claim instead of running ours. No MCP, no CLI, no daemon:

from knos.core import Claims

with Claims(repo=".", who="my-agent") as claims:
    took, holder = claims.take("the parser")
    if not took:
        print(f"{holder['who']} has it")

The server — pip install knos && knos connect puts it in front of Claude Code, Cursor, OpenCode and Claude Desktop, with four tools: search, about, remember and done - the last of which is how an agent says it has finished, so the others stop waiting on work already done.

What breaks when you delete it

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.

Check any of it yourself

Two of these are commands the install gives you. The rest are in the repository, so clone it first — they are scripts and tests, not product.

knos receipts                      # every onchain claim, resolved against Base
knos verify                        # nobody edited the record of who overrode whom

git clone https://github.com/drexthealpha/Knos && cd Knos
python scripts/collide.py          # 16 processes, one topic, 0 double-grants
python scripts/budget.py           # what the store saves when an agent abandons work
python scripts/ablation.py         # 8 arms x 12 trials, each dying with the store

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.

Where everything else went

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

The two onchain parts

Both optional, both off by default. Knos runs with them switched off and nothing on the read path touches a network.

• Base — purchases settle over x402 in real USDC on mainnet, and the receipt goes back into the store, so the money gate reads a Base transaction hash to decide whether to spend again.
• Virtuals — a Telegram bot that is also a registered ACP provider, selling one answer out of this store.

Details and every hash: docs/VERIFICATION.md.

The load-bearing map

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.

How memory made this possible

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.

Prior work

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.

What it cannot do

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.

Licence

MIT. The name is a Greek root for a thing known.