Documentation

Complete User Manual

Comprehensive guide covering installation, configuration, and usage of all Kawa Code components.

Open Complete User Manual

Kawa Code Desktop Application

First thing you need in order to work with Kawa Code is to install the desktop application. Kawa Code is a separate application that you can keep open on a separate monitor, showing you context relevant to your work.

VSCode Extension (Huginn)

The extension communicates with Kawa Code, so please make sure you install the desktop application first. In VSCode, search the marketplace for Kawa Code and install it.

SOC 2

Kawa Code is designed around SOC 2 controls — secure APIs on Google Cloud Platform, robust authentication, encrypted traffic, continuous monitoring, and backups. A third-party audit has not yet been completed; we will update this card once certification is in hand. See our Security page for the full data-flow audit.

Swarm Authentication

For teams who don't want to grant repository access, our non-invasive security model enables collaboration without requesting access to your code repository. Team members are identified through continuously confirmed commit SHA values.


Features

  • Relevant context presented in the Kawa Code application while you switch documents
  • File diffs awareness between you and your team members
  • Quick diffs between you and your peers, for any file
  • List of files changed by peers available in the SCM tree
  • Support for quick branch diffs on the active file
  • Swarm Authorization for private repositories without granting access

Frequently Asked Questions

Kawa Code offers long-term goal coherence for you and your AI. Projects drift — not because goals change deliberately, but because day-to-day focus on smaller steps gradually derails the larger vision. Kawa Code captures these decisions across all your branch timelines as they happen and surfaces them when they matter.

Because some kinds of work stop being linear. The Standard plan is designed for one person, one timeline. The Professional plan exists for situations where multiple lines of reasoning run in parallel and decisions need to be coordinated across humans and AI.

No. Kawa Code's memory layer works on abstracted intent and evolution, not raw source code. You remain in control of where and how AI reasoning happens.

The Translation add-on translates code comments, variable names, and documentation into your preferred language directly inside your editor. It uses our hosted LLM service for convenience, but you can configure your own LLM API key instead.

Most AI coding workflows optimize for accumulation: more rules, more chats, more embeddings, more retrieved context. Over time, that creates context bloat — irrelevant information, stale assumptions, and contradictory past decisions competing for the model's attention.

Kawa Code takes a different approach. It captures the why behind architectural and implementation decisions, curates that knowledge over time, and surfaces only the intent relevant to the current task. The result is faster reasoning, more consistent outputs, and AI systems that retain long-term coherence as projects evolve.

AI-assisted development still carries an "English-first" bias. Non-English-speaking engineers must continuously translate ideas, architecture decisions, and prompts into English, creating cognitive overhead and reducing flow-state efficiency. Large Language Models (LLMs) are predominantly trained on English data, which accounts for about 46% of the web. As a result, an "English premium" exists: prompting AI in English yields 15-30% higher code generation accuracy compared to other languages.

Additionally, non-English-speaking engineers must continuously translate ideas, architecture decisions, and prompts into English, creating cognitive overhead and reducing flow-state efficiency. Our estimates indicate this dual process reduces their productivity by 50% or more. Kawa Code eliminates this barrier through "Universal Programming": developers can read and work with code in their native language while the source on disk stays standard, English-compatible code.

Yes, Kawa Code provides a massive impact even for teams or engineers who don't heavily rely on AI code generation.

First, its patented "real-time intersection detection" allows developers to visually see where teammates are working on the same files before changes are committed. This proactive visibility prevents integration friction, code collisions, and the dreaded "merge hell".

Second, Kawa Code persistently records the "intent" (why a change was made) alongside the code itself, preventing the loss of institutional knowledge when team members leave. This cuts code review and deciphering time in half and provides the benefits of pair programming without tying up two developers, significantly accelerating the onboarding and learning cycle of junior engineers.

Yes — at the session level. When Claude Code spawns subagents to parallelize a task, they share their parent session's identity, so any intent they create, activate, or complete is captured and attributed to that session.

One nuance: a subagent's private reasoning lives in its own transcript, so the individual decisions it verbalizes internally aren't captured yet — only the result it returns to the main session. Per-subagent reasoning capture is on our roadmap. For now, if a subagent makes a decision worth keeping, surface it in the main session so it's recorded.