open-dev-society/kitbash

Kitbash is a tool that helps an AI coding agent figure out which parts of a project idea already exist as ready made packages, instead of writing everything from scratch. You describe what you want to build, and it breaks the idea down into pieces, giving each piece a verdict: borrow it because a real, maintained package already does the job, kitbash it because a similar project is a good reference to read and adapt without adding it as a dependency, or write it because the piece is simple enough to build directly. It works as an MCP server, a kind of plugin that gives an AI agent extra tools to call. Notably, the server itself contains no AI model. Instead, the agent that is already talking to the user does the work of remembering and naming candidate repositories, following a set of instructions the server provides. A second tool then checks every repository name the agent produced against the real GitHub API, removing any that do not actually exist, and flagging ones that are archived, unlicensed, or have not been touched in years. This exists because an AI model asked to name repositories will sometimes invent plausible sounding ones that are not real, and this verification step is what catches that. When ranking real candidates, popularity in the form of star counts only counts for a small, capped portion of the score, so a smaller project that fits the need exactly is not automatically buried by a much more popular but less precise match. Installing it requires Node.js version 18 or later, running npm install and npm run build, then registering the server with a coding assistant using an absolute file path. A GitHub access token is optional but recommended, since requests without one are limited to 60 per hour. A local snapshot file lets the verification step keep working even if the network connection during a demo is unreliable.