Knosh is a tool that I have been building, off and on, for a few months. Effectively, it is my test-bed for seeing what useful work I can get out of local models (e.g., Ollama), while those models still lack the capacity of doing planning or serious programming.

Knosh is a Kotlin NO-SHell agent harness (hence, the name "Knosh"). It lets you execute one-shot prompts via a CLI (not a full TUI) using the model and provider of your choice, from a subset of the ones supported by JetBrains' Koog. It also lets you do more structured tasks, though the only one of those that is shipping at the moment just lets you ask the model to update the KDocs of 1+ Kotlin source files. While there is a nice set of tools that the agent can use, it specifically does not support any sort of shell access (e.g., a Bash tool). That further limits what the agent can do, but it also limits how much damage an agent can cause.

So, for example, you can ask Knosh (and its model):

knosh prompt --agentId general "What can you do for me?"

The output will be however the model responded to that prompt.

The Knosh documentation explains how to install it on Linux and macOS via Homebrew (sorry, Windows users, maybe when I get to 1.0.0...), how to do the basic configuration, and how to run the handful of commands that it presently supports. This is version 0.1.0, and so there is a lot of room for growth. 😅

Several upcoming newsletter issues will explore aspects of Knosh, including:

• The basics of using Koog and how Knosh uses Koog

• How I am thinking about using local models for coding tasks, in their current state, especially for more structured tasks

• How the harness' tools were set up and what security checks I have in place to prevent agents from running amok

• How you can use Knosh to escape from walled-garden coding agent harnesses like Claude Code and use other models than the official ones

• How I went about building Knosh, mostly via Claude Code and a low-end Claude Pro subscription

• Where Knosh might go from here

Knosh is open source, so you can see how it works.

If you have questions about Knosh or my work, use the newsletter comments! Or, hit me up on Mastodon, Bluesky, or Kotlinlang Slack. Or, in an absolute pinch, email works.

I had not expected to have the opportunity to include a link to Simon Willison's comments on a papal encyclical, but, hey.