The Philosophy of Project-Local AI

Why we moved intelligence out of the chat window and into the repository.

The AI Context Problem

For years, we've treated AI coding assistants like transient chat partners. You open a window, paste some code, ask a question, and get an answer. When you close the window, the context builds up, leaks, or vanishes.

This is fundamentally broken for engineering.

Complex software engineering requires state, memory, and rules. A chat window has none of these in a rigorous sense. It relies on probabilistic context retrieval, which is why AI often hallucinates imports, forgets previously established patterns, or rewrites code it just wrote.

Enter Project-Local Intelligence

ORKA shifts the paradigm. Instead of the AI living in the cloud or the IDE sidebar, the intelligence lives inside the project folder itself.

  • 1

    Deterministic Skills

    Skills are not prompts. They are mini-programs stored in .agent/skills that dictate exactly how to build components.

  • 2

    Persistent Brain

    The project remembers its own architecture in .orka/brain.md. It knows what it built yesterday.

  • 3

    Orchestration over Generation

    ORKA doesn't just spew code. It plans, verifies, and updates its internal state before moving to the next task.

// Traditional AI
User: "Add auth"
AI: *Guesses auth provider*
AI: *Invents file structure*
AI: *Forgets to update .env*
// ORKA
User: "Use ORKA"
ORKA: "Reading .orka/brain.md..."
ORKA: "Project uses NextAuth."
ORKA: "Loading auth-module skill..."
ORKA: "Plan created: Add Google Provider."
ORKA: "Executing..."