NoKV × Lingtai: a design-partner collaboration

[wchwawa]

Today we're sharing that NoKV and Lingtai (Lingtai-AI/lingtai) have begun a design-partner collaboration. What you're reading is just the warm-up announcement. Before there's much to show, we wanted to mark the start.

Two projects, one conviction: agents want filesystems

• Lingtai (灵台) is a local-first agent runtime built on the idea that "the project organization is the product." Its agents are long-lived residents with on-disk homes: state, mailboxes, logs, and artifacts all live as plain files you can ls, cat, and grep. State on disk, on purpose. Its name comes from the Zhuangzi (the heart-mind, the square inch where transformation begins), and it frames itself as "an Agent OS that gifts life," where "all things are files" (万物皆文件). Today Lingtai already has an active early community of 240+ users.
• NoKV is a metadata control plane for object-backed agent artifacts: run outputs, logs, checkpoints, and citable evidence in one filesystem-shaped namespace, with atomic publish-by-generation, GC-protected snapshots, and immutable versioned blocks underneath.

"All things are files" on one side, "agents want filesystems" on the other: we reach the same conviction from two layers. Lingtai gives agents a filesystem-shaped home; NoKV is building the durable substrate a home like that can stand on.

What we're exploring together

This is design work, not a shipped integration. Abstractly:

• Workspace checkpoints: let a long-running agent roll its whole workspace back to a known-good state instead of starting over.
• Atomic, crash-consistent publishing: concurrent agent writes and a mid-run crash never leave a half-written workspace.
• Artifact provenance: versioned blocks with digests, so a derived artifact stays traceable to the run that produced it.
• A queryable metadata layer: ask "what produced this / what depends on this" across an agent's outputs.

The constraint we care about most is preserving the plain-file transparency Lingtai is built on. A substrate underneath should add durability, snapshots, and provenance, without taking away the ls/cat/grep you can already point at your agents' state.

Where things stand

Both projects are pre-1.0 and moving fast, so treat this as a forward-looking partnership. We're sharing it now because the direction is the most interesting part, and because we believe in the power of an open-source community.

If a stateful, snapshot-able, auditable agent workspace is something you've wanted: ⭐ star NoKV, follow Lingtai, and watch this space. More as the work takes shape.

Contact

• NoKV: hello@nokv.io
• Lingtai: lingtai2026@gmail.com

Join the community

• Discord (NoKV): https://discord.gg/c5PZapnwPh
• Slack (NoKV): the NoKV channel in the CNCF community Slack (join at https://slack.cncf.io, then open https://cloud-native.slack.com/archives/C0BBDBYE3H6 )
• WeChat group (Lingtai): email lingtai2026@gmail.com for community details