Kilo (experimental)

This page documents how Happier integrates with Kilo Code as an ACP-backed provider.

What Happier runs

Happier spawns the local Kilo Code CLI (kilo / kilocode) and talks to it via ACP (kilo acp / kilocode acp).

That means:

• Kilo runs on your machine (Happier does not proxy your code to a hosted agent).
• Kilo uses your normal Kilo configuration, including models/providers you’ve configured in Kilo.

Install Kilo Code

Install Kilo Code on your machine, then restart Happier:

npm install -g @kilocode/cli@latest
kilocode --version

If you use hstack, you can install Kilo with the providers installer:

hstack providers install kilo
kilocode --version

See Kilo’s CLI docs for the latest install and usage details:

• https://kilo.ai/docs/cli

Authenticate (API key vs “already logged in”)

Happier does not require an API key if Kilo is already authenticated on your machine.

• If you have an API key workflow, set it up in Kilo (or via environment variables supported by Kilo).
• If you use an interactive login/subscription flow, log into Kilo once, then Happier can reuse that local auth state.

Kilo’s auth commands live under:

kilocode auth --help

Enable Kilo in Happier (experimental)

Kilo is behind Happier’s experimental providers rollout.

In the app:

1. Settings
2. AI provider settings
3. Kilo (experimental)

Features supported in Happier

Tool calls (ACP)

In real ACP runs, Kilo consistently surfaces a core tool set that Happier fully traces + normalizes:

• Execute → canonicalized to Bash
• Read
• Edit / Write
• Search → canonicalized to CodeSearch (including “glob-like” patterns)
• Task (sub-agent / child task)
• MCP tool calls (for example Happier’s change_title)

Happier records Kilo’s original tool name as _happier.rawToolName and also assigns a _happier.canonicalToolName so downstream rendering and schema validation are stable.

Resume / session attach

If Kilo’s ACP implementation reports session load support, Happier stores a kiloSessionId in session metadata and can resume the Kilo session on a later attach.

Kilo CLI features that still apply

Because Happier runs the real Kilo CLI, Kilo’s own “project-level” features still matter, including:

• Kilo configuration files (for example ~/.kilocode/config.json)
• Skills and project conventions (for example .kilocode/skills/)
• Custom commands (for example .kilocode/commands/)

Refer to Kilo’s CLI docs for the canonical list:

• https://kilo.ai/docs/cli

Permissions and safety behavior

Happier exposes a provider-agnostic permission mode (default, read-only, safe-yolo, yolo, plan) in the UI.

However, Kilo’s ACP implementation does not currently emit ACP permission-request events reliably in our end-to-end traces. As a result:

• Happier’s per-tool “approve/deny” UI prompts are limited for Kilo.
• Kilo’s own permission / auto-approval system (configured in Kilo) is the primary mechanism that controls what Kilo will do without interactive confirmation.

Kilo documents auto-approval settings and interactive vs autonomous behavior in:

• https://kilo.ai/docs/cli

If you want stricter enforcement today, prefer configuring Kilo’s own permissions/auto-approval settings, and treat Happier’s permission picker for Kilo as “best effort”.

Troubleshooting

“Kilo not found”

• Confirm Kilo is installed: kilocode --version (or kilo --version)
• Restart Happier after installing.
• If Kilo isn’t on PATH, set HAPPIER_KILO_PATH to the absolute path of the kilocode (or kilo) binary.

“Not authenticated”

Authenticate in Kilo using its normal flow (see kilo auth --help or kilocode auth --help), then retry from Happier.