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What is Kition
A local-first AI workspace — Markdown docs, structured tables, and an AI agent, all on your own machine.
Kition is a local-first AI workspace. Think of it as three tools grown together: an Obsidian-style Markdown editor, a Notion-style structured-data layer, and an AI agent that actually does the work — all running on your own machine, reading and writing ordinary files on your own disk.
No proprietary format, no forced login, no "your data lives on our servers". Your documents are .md files on disk, your tables are .kitable files, and you decide which model to use and where your API key lives.
Three primitives
Kition is built from three core capabilities that call into each other. They share one vault and one filesystem, and the agent can read and write your documents and tables directly — that is what sets it apart from an "editor plus plugins" stack.
- Markdown documents — a CodeMirror 6 live-preview editor with wikilinks, backlinks, callouts, Mermaid, KaTeX, slash commands, and a command palette. Everything stays as plain
.mdon disk. - Structured tables (Kitable) — Notion-style fields, views, and records that share the vault with your docs, are directly queryable and writable by the agent, and support AI fields that fill themselves in.
- AI Agent — first-class tools for the filesystem, web, browser, MCP, and tables — with plan / goal mode, hooks, and subagent collaboration.
Why local-first
"Local-first" is not a marketing line — it dictates a chain of concrete product behaviors. Your data lives in a vault directory you pick; open it and it is an ordinary folder you can edit in VS Code, grep across, version with Git, or zip and hand to a colleague.
In the same spirit, Kition is not tied to any single model vendor. Point it at OpenAI Responses, Anthropic Messages, or any OpenAI-compatible endpoint (self-hosted vLLM, Ollama, OpenRouter, Azure, a China-hosted proxy). API keys live in the OS keychain, never in your files.
- Data ownership — your notes and tables stay on your disk and work offline
- Bring your own model (BYOM) — no vendor lock-in; you weigh cost and privacy
- Extensible — hooks, MCP, subagents, and custom tools wire into your existing stack
- Desktop-native — an Electron shell plus a Go sidecar boots like a real app, not another browser tab
How it differs from tools you know
If you have used Obsidian, the document experience will feel familiar — but Obsidian bolts on tables and AI through community plugins, whereas Kition makes structured tables and the agent built-in, first-class citizens.
If you have used Notion, the tables will feel familiar — but Notion is cloud-hosted and proprietary, whereas Kition's tables are local files the agent can read and write directly.
If you have used the ChatGPT / Claude desktop apps, the conversational AI will feel familiar — but those are isolated chat windows, whereas Kition's agent lives inside your knowledge base, able to actually read your docs, edit your tables, and run tools on your machine.
Who it is for
- Heavy note-takers / PKM users — who want Obsidian's freedom plus AI and tables that work out of the box
- Indie developers / researchers — who need an agent assistant that can run tools, query tables, and edit files
- Privacy- and ownership-conscious people — who will not host all their notes on someone else's server
- Bring-your-own-model users — who already have OpenAI / Anthropic / self-hosted keys and want to put them to work
Next steps
The fastest way to understand Kition from here is to install it and try. The pages below take you from zero to running your first agent task.
install-kition— download, install, and finish first-runcreate-first-vault— create your first vault and understand the on-disk layoutconfigure-provider— wire up an AI provider so the agent can runui-tour— get oriented in the four zones of the UI