What are Kins?
Kins are KinBot’s core concept: persistent AI agents that live on your server, remember everything, and work as a team.
Unlike disposable chatbot sessions, a Kin has:
- A permanent identity — name, role, personality, expertise, avatar
- Continuous memory — every conversation is remembered forever through vector + full-text search
- A continuous session — there’s no “new conversation”; the session never resets
- Collaboration skills — Kins talk to each other, delegate tasks, and spawn sub-agents
- Autonomy — cron jobs, webhooks, and channel integrations let them work while you sleep
Anatomy of a Kin
Section titled “Anatomy of a Kin”When you create a Kin, you define:
| Field | Purpose |
|---|---|
| Name | Display name (e.g. “Atlas”) |
| Slug | Unique identifier for inter-Kin communication (e.g. atlas) |
| Role | One-line description of what it does (e.g. “Infrastructure specialist”) |
| Character | Personality traits and communication style |
| Expertise | Domain knowledge and capabilities |
| Model | Which LLM to use (from your configured providers) |
| Provider | Which AI provider to use (optional, defaults to instance default) |
| Avatar | Visual identity in the UI |
How they work
Section titled “How they work”- Messages queue — each Kin has its own priority queue. User messages are processed before automated ones (cron, webhooks, inter-Kin). Within the same priority, messages are processed in order.
- System prompt — KinBot builds a rich system prompt from the Kin’s identity, relevant memories, contacts directory, Kin directory, active channels, and platform directives.
- Memory injection — before each turn, relevant memories are retrieved via semantic search and injected into context.
- Session compacting — when the conversation gets too long for the model’s context window, older messages are summarized into a snapshot. Original messages are always preserved in the database, so no data is lost.
- Tool execution — Kins have access to 100+ built-in tools plus MCP servers and custom tools.
Shared Kins
Section titled “Shared Kins”All users on the instance interact with the same Kins. Each message is tagged with the sender’s identity, so the Kin knows who it’s talking to.
The Hub
Section titled “The Hub”You can designate one Kin as the Hub — a central coordinator that receives all incoming requests and routes them to the most appropriate specialist Kin. The Hub gets an enriched directory view with expertise summaries and active channel information.
What’s next?
Section titled “What’s next?”- System Prompts — craft the perfect personality
- Tools — give your Kins capabilities
- Memory — how Kins remember