Kairos is live. The core loop — search, synthesize, cite — shipped in one afternoon on a slow machine in East Tennessee. This is the first honest shape of a Manitec AI product: stable, respectful of your workflow, and not interested in renting you back the habits you already built.
Product frame
People who use AI as infrastructure, not entertainment. They research, upload, compare, pull context across documents, and hate having key workflow features moved behind a higher wall after adoption.
Solo builders, researchers, indie operators, and obsessive note-workers who need one place to ask, upload, and synthesize.
Restore trust. The product should feel stable, legible, and respectful of dependence rather than eager to exploit it.
Philosophy-grounded product choices: humane limits, transparent scope, and no pretending convenience is generosity when it's really extraction.
Version one
The core loop is done. Now we build the rest of the workflow layer — the parts that make Kairos genuinely irreplaceable for daily use.
System design
Use what already fits your hands. Reuse proven patterns from current Manitec work where it saves time, but do not inherit baggage just because it exists.
Next.js 15 app with a search-first interface, cited answer rendering, and upload tray coming next.
Tavily API for web search. One clean provider, one clear path. No over-engineered federation before day one works.
Groq for speed and cost efficiency. Room later for route-by-task logic as the product matures.
Ship rhythm
Small, mean, useful. The kind of roadmap that gets built instead of admired.
Single thread UI, Tavily search, Groq answer synthesis, cited source rendering. Working end to end and live on Vercel.
Parse uploaded files, chunk them, ground answers against file context, and expose which file influenced the answer.
Add image upload flow, visual Q and A, and a clean answer share page or export function.
Custom domain, tightened UI, homepage language, and open access to trusted early users.
Public note
This product exists because an extremely useful tool taught us two things at once: what modern AI workflow should feel like, and how quickly that trust can be spent. So yes — thank you for the inspiration. And no — users should not have to rent back the habits they already built.
Immediate next moves
The core loop is live. Now we make it irreplaceable.
Point a real domain at Kairos. Something clean that lives under the Manitec brand or stands alone.
PDF, doc, and plain text support. Ground answers in your own documents, not just the web.
Persistent threads so the conversation doesn't die on refresh. Real workflow tool behavior.