In development · macOS · 2026

The project memory layer.

object → representation → context

Kibrys Arxv™ keeps the meaning of a project in plain text files, in the project’s own folder, beside the work it describes. No database to lose. No service to cancel.

Backups preserve the files. Kibrys Arxv™ preserves the context needed to understand them — four years later, by someone who has never met you.

Tell me when it ships See the difference ↓
Local-first Vendor-agnostic Bring your own storage Plain UTF-8 AI-assisted, not AI-dependent

The problem

Same folder. Four years later.

The bytes are fine. Restore from backup and every file comes back exactly as it was. That was never the hard part.

~/Archive/Admissions-Viewbook-2026/ 
Admissions-Viewbook-2026/
├── final_FINAL2-USE-THIS_v84-no-wait-maybe-not.indd
├── Untitled-3.psd
├── viewbook_PRINT.pdf
├── viewbook_PRINT_v2.pdf
├── DSC_4471.NEF
└── notes.docx

6 items. Which one shipped?

Restored from backup in 2030. The designer who made it left in 2027.

The durable unit

Three things travel together.

Copy the folder and you carry all three. That is the whole mechanism: keep the story about the content right next to the content.

01 · Object

Preserve the thing

The original stays in its native form — .indd, .psd, camera masters, old Quark files, Excel 1997 files, a database dump. Nothing has to become a .md Markdown file to be kept.

02 · Representation

Preserve a way to perceive it

A transcript beside the video. A PDF beside the MS Publisher layout. A CSV and schema note beside the database. A window into the object for someone who lacks the software that made the original.

03 · Context

Preserve what it means

MANIFEST.md stores: provenance, relationships, decisions, what supersedes what, what to ignore. Structured enough to index (and search), yet loose enough to just write anything into it.

Graceful degradation

Every upper layer is removable.

Indexes regenerate. The interface can disappear and the filesystem remains. AI can disappear and the manifest remains. Kibrys itself can disappear and the collection is still intelligible.

AI may help reconstruct meaning. AI must never be required to recover it.

  1. AI & semantic interpretation optional
  2. Index, search, interface regenerable
  3. History & work logs useful
  4. Context — MANIFEST.md file durable
  5. Object + Representation files the ground
Design for the next steward, not the current vendor. The one sentence Kibrys Arxv is built around

Boundaries

What Kibrys Arxv is not

a backup product a DAM replacement an archival database a note-taking graph a cloud service an LLM wrapper

It assumes humans are messy, institutions lose continuity, applications disappear, and budgets change. Its only job is to keep those ordinary failures from severing the artifact from its meaning.

AI LLM Compatibility

How Kibrys Arxv plays well with others

GEMINI.md AGENTS.md CLAUDE.md MANIFEST.md

<ai-nerds>
Kibrys Arxv names its canonical project-description file MANIFEST.md for what that file contains, rather than for which LLM is expected to consume it (CLAUDE.md, GEMINI.md, etc).

However Kibrys Arxv also adds extra (shim) files as pointers alongside MANIFEST.md, so that each supported AI tool encounters the filename it expects, with each shim pointing to the canonical MANIFEST.md in that project folder.
</ai-nerds>