Kato

Own your AI conversations.

Kato captures AI conversations from supported IDEs, CLIs, and local apps into files you control. A local daemon creates vendor-agnostic chat "twins" and monitors chats for kato commands like "record" or "stop". It can serve a local web console, and also has a terminal-based status console.

Compatibility

• Codex: VS Code, CLI, local app
• Claude Code: VS Code, CLI, local app
• Gemini: VS Code, CLI

Install

Primary install:

npm install -g @spectacular-voyage/kato@latest

Or with pnpm:

pnpm add -g @spectacular-voyage/kato@latest

The npm package installs prebuilt binaries. It does not compile Kato on your machine.

You can also download a prebuilt bundle from GitHub Releases and put the extracted bundle directory on your PATH.

Supported install targets: Windows x64, macOS x64, macOS arm64, Linux x64 glibc.

The public command is kato. Bundled kato-daemon and kato-web are managed for you.

Upgrade

With npm:

npm install -g @spectacular-voyage/kato@latest

With pnpm:

pnpm update -g @spectacular-voyage/kato --latest

Then confirm the active kato on your PATH:

kato --version

Quickstart

kato init
kato start

mkdir chats-default
cd chats-default
kato workspace init
kato workspace register --alias default --name 'My first Kato workspace'

Then start a new supported AI chat and put ::capture-default on its own line in a user message. It also helps to tell the model to ignore lines that start with ::.

You can also trigger recording from the "Sessions" page in the web UI.

In-Chat Commands

• ::capture-<alias> [path]: snapshot the full conversation, then keep recording
• ::record-<alias> [path]: start recording from this point forward
• ::export-<alias> [path]: write a one-off export
• ::stop: stop all active recordings
• ::stop-<alias>: stop one workspace output

Secrets Redaction

By default, Kato scans every captured conversation for things that look like credentials — vendor API keys (AWS, GitHub, Slack, OpenAI, Anthropic, …), PEM private keys, JWTs, and password=/api_key=-style assignments — and replaces them with [REDACTED:<rule-id>] placeholders before anything is written to twins, recordings, exports, or shown in the web UI. Each redaction is recorded in the security audit log (rule and count only, never the secret).

Note: the AI tool's own transcript files still contain the original text; Kato only controls what lands in Kato-created files.

Configure via secretsPolicy in ~/.kato/shared/kato-shared-config.yaml:

secretsPolicy:
  mode: redact            # redact (default) | detect (log only) | off
  disabledRules: []       # rule ids to skip, e.g. [jwt]
  allowlist: []           # literal substrings or /regex/ to never redact

Local Web

From the web UI, you can start and stop recordings, and manage your Kato data and configuration.

kato web init --username <username>
kato web start

Then open http://127.0.0.1:5173/login.

kato web init prompts for a password on an interactive terminal. If config already exists, Kato reuses it.

Help

Use kato help, kato help web, and kato help workspace for current command details.

Development

Deno 2.x is only required if you are developing Kato from source. Internal project notes live in documentation/notes.