Knos

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.

Ninety 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. There is no hosted playground and there will not be one: nothing on the read path touches a network, and that is a test rather than a promise. The local path is the playground.

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	2 — caura#1299, drt#1098, which invited a second
Open in real repositories	6, including repomix#1837 (28k stars)
Agents racing for one topic, real processes	16, 0 double-grants in 128 attempts; 15 when the memory is not shared — collide.json
Onchain receipts that resolve	11 of 11, 8 on Base mainnet with USDC — python scripts/verify_receipts.py
Hold length learned per agent	29% less time blocked on work nobody was doing — contention.json
Ablation arms that die with the store	12
Refusal that stops a filesystem write	yes — and renaming the file does not get past it, test_rename_bypass.py
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 three tools: search, about, remember.

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

python scripts/collide.py          # 16 processes, one topic, 0 double-grants
python scripts/verify_receipts.py  # every onchain claim, resolved
python scripts/ablation.py         # 12 arms

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.

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.