katra MCP server

katra

A committed, rich-component dev log you write as you build — for a developer working solo or alongside a coding agent — and the memory that makes spec-driven agentic development work. Markdown entries with embedded interactive components, stamped automatically with the commit and diffstat they describe, served as a live, auto-reloading page.

It exists to make one workflow reliable: chronicle the work as it happens — the why, the dead ends, the screenshots and animations — and never lose a draft to a "promote" step that gets skipped.

The same store is what keeps an agent effective across sessions: designs land as committed specs, tasks point at them, and a session starting cold reads the spec instead of re-deriving intent from a conversation that no longer exists. That loop is the agent workflow below.

katra init --install-hook        # store + portable Git auto-stamp
katra new "Reworked the swing"   # start a draft (a markdown file)
katra capture shot.png           # drop a screenshot into it
katra compare before.png after.png
katra serve                      # live page on the LAN, reloads as you write
git commit -m "…"                # the draft is stamped with this commit

The one idea

A draft is an entry with no commit hash. That is the entire state machine.

It appears in the In Progress panel the moment you create it. There is no scratch file, no separate document, no "publish" toggle. Stamping it — adding the hash and the diffstat — is what drops it into the log.

Everything else follows from that. Nothing can get stranded in a buffer you forgot to promote, because there is no buffer. The log ends up in the order you actually worked, including the parts that did not pan out, which is the half a squashed history always loses.

The viewer

katra serve renders the store as a live page — no build step, no static site to regenerate while you write. The spine down the middle is the log in the order it happened: future epics, the entry in flight right now, then the past. The right rail surfaces what a flat file list buries — decisions that are still load-bearing, and which tags a stretch of work threads through.

More screenshots

An entry, open — this one shipped mid-draft with a before/after slider comparing two icon-mark directions, dragged in with katra compare:

The board, grouped by status — specced is its own column between todo and doing, for the tasks that have a committed design and nobody building them yet:

Shortened. The full README is on GitHub.