kolm  /  learn  /  first .kolm in 5 minutes

First .kolm in 5 minutes.

By the end of this page you will have one signed .kolm file on your laptop. It redacts PII from any text you throw at it. It runs offline. No data leaves your machine.

Golden Path 1 of 3 . v1.0 . tested on macOS, Linux, Windows (PowerShell + cmd)

What you will have. A my-redactor.kolm file (about 30 KB), K-score ≥ 0.85, HMAC-signed, content-addressable, and a verbatim copy of the spec + seeds + recipes that built it. It will redact patient names, SSNs, emails, phone numbers, and credit-card numbers from any text input you pipe in. The artifact is yours forever; uninstalling kolm does not stop it from running.
five-minute path . one terminal . zero dependencies past Node 20+

Before you start

You need Node.js 20 or newer and a terminal. That is the whole list. The CLI is one self-contained JavaScript binary; no Docker, no Python, no GPU. kolm compile in cloud mode pings kolm.ai for the build step, but every command on this page works offline once the artifact is on disk.

node --version  # should print v20.x or higher
step 1

Install the CLI.

30 seconds

kolm ships from GitHub. One npm command, then it is on your PATH as kolm.

npm i -g github:sneaky-hippo/kolmogorov-stack
kolm --version
kolm v0.2.6
checkpoint if kolm --version prints a version, you are done with step 1. If it errors, npm config get prefix should be on your PATH.
step 2

Build your first artifact.

90 seconds

kolm build is the one-shot wrapper. It scaffolds a spec, generates a small seed set, compiles the artifact, verifies the signature chain, and prints the K-score. --from redactor picks the PII redactor template; --yes accepts every default.

kolm build my-redactor --from redactor --yes
scaffolding spec my-redactor.spec.json (template: redactor) . ok
generating seeds my-redactor.seeds.jsonl (10 rows) . ok
compiling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
K-score for my-redactor.kolm: 0.874  (gate >= 0.85 - pass)
verifying signature . ok
artifact written: my-redactor.kolm  (28.4 KB)

try it:
  kolm run my-redactor.kolm --input <sample.json>
  echo {"text":"..."} | kolm run my-redactor.kolm
checkpoint verdict pass means K ≥ 0.85 against the held-out cases. If you see fail, the iterate guidance the CLI prints points at the next move; come back here when verdict reads pass.
step 3

Inspect what you got.

30 seconds

kolm inspect prints the manifest in plain text. This is what a security reviewer sees when they audit the artifact.

kolm inspect my-redactor.kolm
artifact: my-redactor.kolm
task:     redact identifier patterns from free text
built:    2026-05-16 14:22:08Z (12s ago)
size:     28.4 KB on disk

K-score for my-redactor.kolm: 0.874  (gate >= 0.85 - pass)

runtime:    cloud
tier:       starter
base model: none (recipe-only)
signature:  valid (hmac-sha256)
recipes:    1 (redact-identifiers-v1)
evals:      10 cases
checkpoint signature: valid means the HMAC chain end-to-end re-verifies on your hardware. The artifact has not been tampered with since it left the compile pipeline.
step 4

Run it offline.

60 seconds

kolm run executes the artifact against an input. JSON in, JSON out. The execution is local; no network call.

echo {"text":"patient John Doe, SSN 123-45-6789, email j.doe@hospital.org"} | kolm run my-redactor.kolm
patient [REDACTED_NAME], SSN [REDACTED_SSN], email [REDACTED_EMAIL]

recipe: redact-identifiers-v1  .  3.2 ms

Or with a file input (works on Windows cmd too, no quoting headaches):

echo {"text":"call me at 415-555-2244"} > sample.json
kolm run my-redactor.kolm --input sample.json
call me at [REDACTED_PHONE]

recipe: redact-identifiers-v1  .  2.8 ms
checkpoint the artifact runs in single-digit milliseconds on a 2020-era laptop. There is no API call, no cloud round-trip, no GPU. The only thing that touched the network so far was the original kolm build.
step 5

Eject and audit.

30 seconds

The .kolm file is a zip with deterministic contents. kolm eject unpacks it. Nothing is hidden; nothing is encrypted. This is the "no lock-in" promise made into a verb.

kolm eject my-redactor.kolm
ejected my-redactor.kolm -> ./my-redactor.eject
  9 files, sha256=a1b2c3d4e5f6...

no lock-in. your AI is yours.
  cat ./my-redactor.eject/EJECT_README.md   # what each file is
  cat ./my-redactor.eject/manifest.json     # task, base, K-score
  kolm inspect my-redactor.kolm              # re-verify the signature chain

Inside the ejected folder:

  • manifest.json task, base model, signing mode, K-score, content hashes
  • spec.json the spec you compiled from, verbatim
  • recipes/ deterministic JS routines kolm chose to satisfy the spec
  • evals.jsonl the (input, expected) cases that produced the K-score
  • receipts/ HMAC chain receipts proving the compile pipeline ran end-to-end
  • signature.json detached signature over manifest + recipes + evals
  • EJECT_README.md plain-English guide to every file, auto-generated
checkpoint you can hand the ejected folder to a security reviewer who has never seen kolm before, and they have everything they need to audit the artifact without running our CLI.

What just happened

You compiled a spec into a deterministic AI artifact and ran it on your hardware. The artifact has a measurable accuracy score (K), a cryptographic signature, and a fully auditable bill of materials. No vendor lock-in: the file is a standard zip, the recipe inside is plain JavaScript, and the algorithm that scored it is open-source. The whole thing is 28 KB.

This is the minimum viable kolm. Everything else in the product (cloud GPU training, team-private hub, edge export to phones, RAG attachment, agent observation loops) is built on top of this one shape.

What to do next

If something went wrong

  • npm error: Node version mismatch. node --version must be 20.0.0 or higher.
  • K-score below 0.85: the iterate guidance prints next steps. Most common fix: kolm seeds validate my-redactor.seeds.jsonl to check the seed set, then re-run kolm build.
  • Windows cmd quoting: single quotes around JSON do not work in cmd.exe. Use --input <file> or pipe via echo as shown above.
  • kolm: command not found: npm config get prefix should be on your PATH. Or run npx -y github:sneaky-hippo/kolmogorov-stack build my-redactor --from redactor --yes.
  • Still stuck: open an issue at github.com/sneaky-hippo/kolmogorov-stack/issues or email hello@kolm.ai.