Introduction

kitchn is a workflow layer for coding agents. It decides who picks up an issue, who works on it, who checks it and what is allowed to ship. The work itself runs on an orchestrator you already use; Orca is the first one.

kitchn borrows the kitchen brigade: each task goes to a station with one owner, an independent expediter checks the exact revision before anything leaves the pass, and trust is earned from recorded evidence rather than assumed.

The pieces

• House: the organization kitchn works for. It owns the engineering rules, repository allowlist, reviewers, credentials and posting limits. See Houses.
• Roles: eight stations, each with a responsibility, the evidence it owes and a boundary. See The brigade.
• Pinned guidance: a house’s rules are imported as a verified snapshot and pinned by revision, so every task knows exactly which rules it ran under.
• Backends: orchestrators that launch and supervise workers. A workflow names the capabilities it needs; a missing capability blocks the workflow.

What works today

kitchn is early. The CLI can:

• register a house with a few prompts, or from a reviewed policy file,
• import and pin house guidance from a verified bundle,
• adopt a repository by recording its binding in your registry, without writing anything into the repository,
• diagnose what is still missing with doctor,
• scaffold or adopt repositories from house templates without overwriting local files,
• run an issue, a pull request or an issue draft from inside your agent session with the /kitchn skill,
• preview cleanup, project decomposition and schedule budgets before anything acts.

Pickup, the merge gate, triage, the trust ledger and scheduled runs exist in the library but do not run unattended yet. Project status lists what is done and what is next.

What kitchn never does on its own

Installing kitchn starts no workers or schedules and grants no authority. Posting, merging, publishing and cleanup each need their own explicit grant from the house. See Authority.