Operations

Your memory lives in one place on your machine — a vault directory you chose. Everything else Kaleidoscope touches (editor configuration, agent instructions, account credentials, the installed executables) has its own lifecycle, and removing any of them does not remove your memory.

Find your profile first

You named a vault root when you initialized a profile. To see which profile is active and where it points, without printing credentials or any memory content:

kaleidoscope profile list
kaleidoscope config --profile default --json
kaleidoscope doctor --project "$PWD"

Back up and restore

Back up by copying the whole vault directory while nothing is connected to it — close the editors and agents you have connected first, so nothing is writing to it mid-copy. Copy the directory as a whole; a partial copy is not a vault. To restore, or to move your memory to another machine or another path, put the directory back and point a profile at it:

kaleidoscope init --profile default --root /absolute/path/to/the/vault

Disconnect and uninstall

These are four separate operations, and it matters that you know which one you are doing.

• kaleidoscope disconnect HOST removes only the configuration Kaleidoscope itself wrote into that editor. Other settings in the same file are left alone.
• kaleidoscope instructions remove removes the agent guidance pointer, which is a separate thing from the connection.
• Uninstalling the package removes the executables.
• kaleidoscope logout removes or revokes account credentials.

None of the four deletes a vault. Your memory survives all of them.

Delete a vault

Deleting a vault is deliberately its own operation: it previews what it will delete, asks you to confirm, and acts on exactly one fully resolved path. A broad path, an unresolved variable, or an ambiguous target is refused rather than guessed at. Deleting a memory and deleting the vault that holds it are different acts — the first is something you ask the engine to do, the second removes the files.

Install, update, and roll back

Installing, updating, rolling back to the previous version, and uninstalling have each been run on a Mac with Apple Silicon and behaved correctly, and a vault kept alongside was byte-for-byte identical afterwards. That is the whole of what has been established. Nothing is signed for production, and there is no channel to update from yet, so this is not a supported update path — it is a mechanism we have run once, on one machine.

What gets installed

Two things: a language package for npm or Python, and a second package built for your platform. The language package holds the client library and the kaleidoscope and kscope commands; the platform package holds the manager and the engine, as object code. There is no install hook, runtime download, compiler, or source-build fallback — nothing is fetched or built on your machine after the download. The engine source is in neither package.

Encrypted vaults, on a Mac

On a Mac you can choose to keep a vault inside an encrypted disk image. Its password is generated by macOS, kept in your login Keychain, and shown to you once as a recovery key — write that down, it is the only copy. This is macOS only; elsewhere the command refuses.