About Khiip

Khiip's open-source core is a substrate for the things you save from the web — captured into typed, owned Markdown on your own machine, in a shape your editor, your scripts, and your agents can all read.

It started as a personal pain point. I've spent a few years building tools for myself with LLMs, and the project I kept circling back to was a knowledge base in two halves: a capture layer for everything I came across, and an analysis layer to query it. The analysis half was racing ahead on its own. The capture half — the part I assumed was already solved — wasn't. So I built it. And the more I built, the less it looked like a capture tool and the more it looked like a substrate: the fixed shape underneath, separate from whatever application you happen to read your captures in.

Read the founding essay: I wanted to give my agent a memory. I needed a substrate. →

The name

Khiip is named after the khipu (Quechua; also spelled quipu), the Inca knotted-cord system for recording information — numbers and records encoded in the type, position, and color of knots on cords that hang from a primary cord. I chose it because a khipu is a substrate: a durable, structured record that outlived the tools, and even the empire, that made it.

The khipu isn't a dead artifact. Much of the original Inca system was never deciphered; Harvard's Khipu Database Project has spent two decades cataloging the surviving examples — knots, cord lengths, fiber colors — to work out how they were built and read. And the tradition itself is still alive: some Andean communities in Peru keep and use khipus in village life, and herders still tie them to count livestock. Khiip only borrows the name. It isn't a khipu, and doesn't claim to be.

Open core

Khiip's daemon and substrate are AGPL-3.0 and free — capture, typed payloads, local recall, REST and MCP, plain-Markdown renders. You never pay to read your own data. And because the daemon is AGPL and the source is public, it isn't a black box that leaves when I do: if I ever stop maintaining it, anyone can fork it and keep it running. Khiip Plus — the enriched, platform-styled renders and the deeper per-source capture — is the paid product that funds the work, and it arrives alongside the public launch.