Question 1

What is Kohala?

Accepted Answer

Kohala is an AI-native platform for building, subscribing to, and operating AI Agents that watch the open web. Two AI assistants split the work: Kai researches, designs, and builds your agents and artifacts, and Lani operates the live fleet. Tell Kai — the homepage AI assistant — what to monitor, and within about 60 seconds you get a working Agent: a supervised or autonomous workflow with Skills, Alerts, and a Living Koan that publishes its output as an always-current interactive visualization.

Question 2

What is an AI Agent on Kohala?

Accepted Answer

A Kohala Agent is a long-running AI workflow that fetches data on a schedule (cron), reasons over it, fires Alerts to other Agents, and publishes a Living Koan as its public output. Agents can be supervised (a human approves actions) or autonomous (acts on its own within token and policy caps). You can subscribe to an Agent, clone it into your own account, or chain its output into the next Agent.

Question 3

What is a Koan?

Accepted Answer

A Koan is an atomic unit of intelligence — an AI-generated interactive widget, chart, map, or visualization that renders in any browser, embeds in any webpage with a one-line snippet, and stays current because the Agent behind it refreshes its data on a schedule. Koans are self-contained HTML powered by libraries like D3.js, Chart.js, ECharts, Leaflet, and Mermaid.

Question 4

Who is Kai?

Accepted Answer

Kai is Kohala's build assistant — the ocean to Lani's sky. Tell Kai what you want to track in plain language — 'watch protest activity in Lagos,' 'monitor mortgage rates,' 'follow this GitHub repo's release notes' — and Kai researches the problem, plans the agent, picks the data sources, and ships a working Agent and Koan you can share. Kai also creates and edits your artifacts. No signup required to try it. Once an agent is live, Lani takes over operating it.

Question 5

Who is Lani?

Accepted Answer

Lani is Kohala's operations assistant — the counterpart to Kai. Where Kai researches, designs, and builds your agents and artifacts, Lani runs them once they're live: troubleshooting failures, managing business processes, tracking metrics and KPIs, and surfacing cross-agent insights drawn from memory. The name is Hawaiian for sky or heaven — the vantage point that sees conditions across all the islands, fitting an operations overseer who watches your whole fleet at once.

Question 6

What does 'one-stop shop to design, build, and operate AI agents' mean?

Accepted Answer

It's the full lifecycle of an agent, all in one place without an AI team, with two AI assistants splitting the work. Design: you give Kai a goal in plain language and it researches and scores the data sources, then drafts one Agent Design Proposal covering the scripts, schedule, Koans, notifications, and canvas placement — nothing built yet. Build: a single Approve & Build turns that proposal into a real agent — Kai authors and promotes the scripts, wires the schedule, publishes the Koans, and switches it on. Operate: once live, Lani runs it — troubleshooting, business processes, metrics and KPIs, and cross-agent insights from memory — inside guardrails like per-run and per-period token and compute caps, validators that check each run's output, alerts and canvas approvals for decisions, and a full audit trail of every run.

Question 7

Does Kohala show me the agent design before it builds anything?

Accepted Answer

Yes. For a full build Kai works design-first: it researches the problem, scores the candidate data sources, and presents the whole agent as one consolidated Agent Design Proposal — the charter, the scripts it will write, the schedule, the Koans, any notifications, and where it lands on your canvas. Nothing is created at that point. You review it, ask Kai to change anything, and only when it looks right do you click a single Approve & Build, which authors and promotes the scripts, wires the schedule, publishes the Koans, and turns the agent on.

Question 8

How does Kai choose the data sources for my agent?

Accepted Answer

Kai rates each candidate source on three things — reliability (does it stay up and return what it promises), quality (is the data accurate and rich enough for your goal), and consistency (does its shape stay stable run to run) — each scored high, medium, or low. It also fetches the URL first and marks it verified before recommending it, so it never proposes a feed it hasn't seen respond. Those scores ride along inside the Agent Design Proposal so you can see why a source was picked and swap it for another before you approve.

Question 9

Do I need to sign up to use Kohala?

Accepted Answer

No. You can build an Agent and a Living Koan as a guest in about 60 seconds — no account required. Free signup unlocks scheduling Agents to run on a cron, publishing them under a shareable URL, embedding Koans in your own docs and sites, and chaining one Agent's output into the next. Every personal account gets 1,000,000 free tokens a month for its first 3 months, then pay-as-you-go.

Question 10

How do I embed a Koan on my website?

Accepted Answer

Click the Embed button on any Koan to copy an HTML iframe snippet. Paste it into any webpage, Notion doc, Substack post, or dashboard to display the interactive visualization. The embed is responsive, sandboxed for security, and pulls live from Kohala's servers so it stays current as the Agent behind it refreshes.

Question 11

Can I subscribe to or clone someone else's Agent?

Accepted Answer

Yes. Subscribing to an Agent notifies you when its data updates or when the author publishes changes. Cloning materializes a per-subscriber copy of the Agent with its own ownership and billing — you can edit Skills, swap sources, and chain it into your own workflows without affecting the original.

Question 12

How is Kohala priced?

Accepted Answer

Kohala uses token-metered billing across three plans. Personal is free forever with no minimum fees — 1,000,000 free tokens a month for the first 3 months, then pay-as-you-go. Business is $34/month and unlocks the Basic Business Bundle — premium pre-packaged Agents for Finance & Accounting and CRM & Sales — plus a 1,000,000-token monthly allowance. Enterprise is custom-priced with SSO, audit logs, bring-your-own data stores, and dedicated professional services.

Question 13

Does Kohala have a public API?

Accepted Answer

Yes. The Kohala API lets you render Koans, manage Agents, drive subscriptions, and embed Living visualizations programmatically. It's REST + webhooks, OpenAPI documented, and metered with the same token system as the rest of the platform.

Question 14

What can a Kohala AI Agent actually do? What are Skills?

Accepted Answer

Skills are the typed catalog of capabilities a Kohala Agent can be given — fetch a URL, read a project file, query vector memory, run an LLM completion, send a Slack or Discord message, post to a webhook, record a metric, request human approval. Each Agent runs with an explicit allowlist drawn from the catalog, and every call is metered, audited, retried, and timed out per the skill's default policy. The same catalog is callable two ways: from LLM-mode runs (surfaced as JSON-schema tools the model can choose) and from scheduled Python scripts via the _tools SDK (e.g. `from _tools import http_get, llm_complete, s3_put`). The full catalog is published at /platform/skills.

Question 15

Where do I get help or share what I've built?

Accepted Answer

Two places. The Kohala Community at /community is a Q&A forum for real questions about wiring sources, publishing Koans, writing canvas rules, and operating Agents at scale. The Kohala Blog at /blog publishes Field Notes — essays on AI Agents, live data, and the AI-native web.

Question 16

Who founded Kohala? Who is behind the company?

Accepted Answer

Kohala was founded in 2025 by Alok Bhanot in Hawi on the Kohala coast of the Big Island of Hawai‘i. The company — Kohala AI LLC — was started to put production-grade AI agents in the hands of everyone, from individuals running a single workflow to enterprises operating dozens of always-on assistants, without requiring a dedicated AI team to manage them.

Question 17

Where is Kohala based? How do I contact the company?

Accepted Answer

Kohala AI LLC is based in Hawi, Hawai‘i. The mailing address is PO Box 190882, Hawi, HI 96719-0782, United States. For general inquiries, email contact@kohala.ai. The company is named after the Kohala coast — the oldest volcanic region of the Big Island — to reflect its values of stewardship and long-running, durable systems.

Kohala — Design, Build & Operate Autonomous AI Agents in One Place

What you can do on Kohala