.kolm noun · the artifact
The signed zip produced by kolm compile. Seven entries: model weights, LoRA adapter, recipe pack, recall index, verifier, manifest, signature. Runs on any kolm runtime. /anatomy.
kolm noun · the binary
The CLI. Invoked as kolm in a shell. Subcommands: compile, run, inspect, verify, serve, eval, benchmark, score, capture, distill, doctor, version. To Kolmogorov what git is to Git or gcc is to GCC.
Kolmogorov noun · the company
The team and product surface that ships kolm. Named for Andrey Kolmogorov, who in 1965 defined the size of the smallest program that produces a given output. That is the question the compiler answers.
K-score noun · the gate
A weighted scalar over five sub-scores measured at compile time: K = 0.40·A + 0.15·S + 0.15·L + 0.15·C + 0.15·V where A is accuracy on held-out evals, S is size penalty, L is latency, C is cost-per-call, V is recipe coverage. Default ship gate is 0.85; safety-critical 0.95; prototype 0.70. /k-score.
recipe noun · a specialist routine
A small reusable unit inside an artifact that handles a known sub-task without invoking the full model. The recipe pack is one of the seven layers. Recipes are extracted from observation traces during compile.
recall noun · the corpus index
The sqlite-vec index baked into the artifact. Each row is an example or fact the model can ground on at inference time. Built by deduplicating and embedding the input corpus.
verifier noun · the gate function
A small program embedded in the artifact that decides whether a candidate output for a given input is correct. May be a regex, a JSON-schema check, a deterministic test, or a tiny LM judge. Called by kolm eval and during k-sample voting.
k-sample noun · verified inference
The compile-time procedure: sample k candidates from the teacher, run each through the verifier, take the winning candidate as the label. Default k=8. Higher k buys label quality at the cost of teacher tokens.
distill verb · train the student
The training step inside kolm compile. Takes the verified labels from k-sample and fits a LoRA adapter on the chosen base model. Produces the adapter.bin entry of the artifact.
manifest noun · the metadata
The JSON header inside the artifact. Lists each layer's hash, size, role, and lineage (teacher version, base model, compile parameters, K-score sub-scores). Signed as ring 4 of the receipt chain.
receipt noun · the per-call proof
An HMAC-SHA256 record of one inference call: input hash, output hash, timestamp, artifact id, K-score at ship time. Receipts stay on the device that made the call; they can be exported for audit. Optional Sigstore Rekor anchor for tamper-evident timestamping.
receipt chain noun · four rings
Four nested HMAC stages that link a runtime receipt back to the original artifact: ring 1 (model weights), ring 2 (adapter), ring 3 (recipes + recall), ring 4 (manifest). kolm verify re-derives all four in about 80 ms.
capture verb · proxy and record
Route frontier API calls through /v1/capture/anthropic or /v1/capture/openai so the (input, output) pair is recorded under a corpus_namespace. The recorded pairs become labels for a future distill. capture-and-distill.
RS-1 noun · the spec
The artifact-format specification for the .kolm file: layer schema, manifest fields, signature scheme. MIT-licensed and versioned independently of the compiler.
frontier model noun · the teacher
A large hosted model used as the teacher during compile (Anthropic Claude, OpenAI GPT, Google Gemini, your own). You bring the API key. Tokens are spent during k-sample, not at runtime.
base model noun · the student
The open-weight model the LoRA is trained on top of. Typical choices: Phi-3-mini, Qwen2.5-3B, Llama-3.2-3B for size; Qwen2.5-7B, Hermes-3-8B for capability. The base hash is recorded in the manifest.
LoRA noun · the adapter
A small low-rank weight delta applied on top of the base model at runtime. Typical size 50 to 200 MB. Stored as adapter.bin in the artifact.
MCP noun · Model Context Protocol
The protocol an artifact speaks when started with kolm serve --mcp. Discovered by clients (claude code, cursor, continue, open mcp client) over stdio or SSE on loopback first, with optional external exposure.
compile flywheel noun · the loop
The capture-and-distill loop: every API call you proxy generates labels, every 1000 verified labels can become a fresh LoRA, every fresh LoRA reduces your dependence on the frontier. The thing you buy when you pay kolm is the flywheel, not the compute.