Introducing kprompt: talk to your cluster
We built an open-source CLI that turns plain English into a reviewable Kubernetes plan — then applies with your approval. Here's why, what shipped, and how to try it.
If you operate Kubernetes, you already know the drill: kubectl for reads, manifests or Helm for changes, dashboards when something breaks, and a mental map of which namespace, context, and deployment name you actually mean. kprompt is our bet that a single sentence should be enough to start — as long as what happens next is visible, reviewable, and under your control.
kprompt is an experimental, MIT-licensed CLI. You type what you want in natural language. The tool turns that into a structured plan against your existing kubeconfig, runs safety checks, asks you to approve on a TTY (unless you pass --approve), and only then executes. No hosted agent in your cluster. No vendor lock-in on the model — bring your own API keys.
The problem we're solving
LLMs are good at intent: “scale payment-api to three replicas”, “roll back redis”, “why is this pod crash-looping?”. They're not good enough to trust with blind apply. Operators need speed without giving up accountability — especially on shared clusters where a wrong command has blast radius.
- You shouldn't need to memorize kubectl flag order for routine day-2 work
- You shouldn't auto-apply model output without seeing the plan first
- You shouldn't send cluster credentials to a SaaS control plane just to run a prompt
How it works
Every interaction follows the same loop: Prompt → Plan → Safety → Apply. Reads (list, get, logs, describe, explain) run immediately. Mutations always produce a plan first — with live diffs when the API allows — then risk scoring and hard denies before anything touches the cluster.
Typical flow
$ kprompt "scale redis to 2" -n staging
Plan
1. kubectl scale deployment/redis --replicas=2 -n staging
Risk: low
Apply? [y/N]What's in v0.2 today
- Deploy, scale, rollback, and named delete
- Read path: get/list, explain, logs, describe
- Plan → safety → approve → apply with optional --wait on rollouts
- Local prompt history (~/.kprompt/history.jsonl) — no manifests or keys stored
- CI-stable JSON PlanResult output for pipeline gates
- Multiple LLM providers (Gemini, OpenAI, Anthropic, Groq, Ollama, and others) via BYOK
What we're not claiming
kprompt is early software. Plans can be incomplete or wrong. Hard-deny rules catch known-dangerous patterns, but they don't replace your judgment. We don't ship Helm orchestration, GitOps, or in-cluster agents yet — those are on the public roadmap, not hidden behind a paywall.
- Not production-hardened — start on kind or a non-production cluster
- Not a replacement for code review of manifests you care about
- Not a hosted team product today — org policy and audit are explored for later
Try it in five minutes
Install
curl -fsSL https://kprompt.ai/install | bashConfigure provider and run a read
export KPROMPT_GEMINI_API_KEY="..."
kprompt config set provider gemini
kprompt config set namespace default
kprompt "list deployments"Full install, provider, safety, and CI docs live at kprompt.ai/docs. Source and issues are on GitHub — contributions and feedback welcome. We'll publish more here as we ship Helm depth, Homebrew, and the next integration layers.
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