The ikigai library
Five books teach ikigai, a kernel that serves everything as a resource: named, cached, composed and governed by capabilities. They are written to be read in order, and each one runs in the page: its examples are cells you can run against a kernel compiled to WebAssembly, and every listing is compiled and tested, and every shell session run, whenever the books are built.
The ikigai Book
The foundation. Resources, spaces, capabilities and golden threads, from the first endpoint you write to hosts of your own, modules, scripts and the space that changes while it runs. It starts with twenty minutes at the command line, nothing compiled, and builds a game of tic-tac-toe and a spreadsheet out of resources along the way. Open The ikigai Book.
- Who it is for: Anyone new to ikigai: a developer who wants to know what a resource-oriented kernel is and how to build on one. Rust helps from the second part on.
- Read first: Nothing. This is where to begin.
- Start at: Twenty minutes, nothing compiled
The gonk Book
gonk, the work ledger and review host, built from the pieces The ikigai Book teaches. A ledger of your own in the page and on your machine, the same ledger reached by an agent over a socket and over MCP, a repository browser with explanations from a model it mounts, and review without a reviewer. Open The gonk Book.
- Who it is for: Anyone who wants a ledger for work shared between people and agents, and readers of The ikigai Book who want to see a real host composed from its modules.
- Read first: Nothing is required: where a chapter leans on an idea from The ikigai Book, it links there. That book’s first part makes the rest easier.
- Start at: Introduction
Building ikigai UIs
User interfaces the ikigai way, where a view is a resource. It builds a kernel inspector, a small real app that shows a running kernel’s cache, golden threads, topology and catalog as pages, then views over a JSON document and a CSV table, and delivers them over HTTP with htmx and a push stream. Open Building ikigai UIs.
- Who it is for: Developers building pages, dashboards or apps on ikigai, for a browser now and for other targets later.
- Read first: The first part of The ikigai Book, for resources, spaces, capabilities and golden threads.
- Start at: A page is a composed resource
The ikigai Architecture
How ikigai is put together, taught as one substrate read two ways: the patterns a person operates are the patterns that authorize and confine them. It opens with resource-oriented computing and how it generalizes the Web, then carries one worked resource, a ledger item, through the capability spine and the manifold-driven UI, the door, the overlay chain, the economics of golden threads and caching, and presence and the audit axis. Open The ikigai Architecture.
- Who it is for: Readers of The ikigai Book who can write against the kernel and want to see how the pieces fit, and why the pieces that confine are the pieces that serve.
- Read first: The ikigai Book, for resources, spaces, capabilities and golden threads, and its chapters on dynamic spaces, which the overlay chain is built from.
- Start at: Introduction
Running ikigai
The operator’s book: the ikigai binary, its flags and subcommands, and what it takes to run kernels for real. The REPL and its modes, the config home, serving a kernel over a socket and over QUIC with certificates, composing kernels, the HTTP door, hosting layers, MCP, running unattended, logging, budgets, upgrades, and what to do when it goes wrong. Every command in it is run against a pinned release whenever the book is built. Open Running ikigai.
- Who it is for: Anyone who runs the ikigai binary: on their own machine, as a server for other machines, or unattended.
- Read first: The first part of The ikigai Book helps, for what a resource, a capability and a golden thread are; this book links there rather than teaching them again.
- Start at: The REPL and its modes
The books are built, tested and published together, from one repository: https://github.com/ikigai-rs/ikigai-tutorial.