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Introducing kairos-lab

· 3 min read

I want to introduce kairos-lab, a small CLI built to remove friction from first-time Kairos experiments on macOS and Linux.

Why it exists​

Quickstarts fall apart when people get stuck on local virtualization. On Apple Silicon, VirtualBox is a non-starter. On Linux vs macOS, QEMU setup and packages differ just enough to slow people down. That detour is not the point. The goal of the quickstart is to teach the Kairos lifecycle and the idea of immutable systems, not to turn someone into a host-virtualization expert.

kairos-lab simplifies this path. It gives newcomers one consistent set of steps across macOS and Linux so they can focus on learning Kairos, not wrestling with host-specific setup.

Who it's for (and who it's not)​

This is for people who rarely touch VMs and just want to try Kairos. It's also for workshops, where I want everyone starting from the same baseline so we can spend time on the actual content.

Power users should absolutely keep using their preferred virtualization software. kairos-lab is not a replacement for full-featured VM tooling. It's the on-ramp.

Getting started​

Install via Homebrew or download a binary from the releases page. That's it.

My first vibe-coded work project​

This is the first project I'm fully vibe coding for work. I didn't write the code myself; I acted as a tester and product owner. That might sound like a bad thing, but I see it as a positive in this case.

This is not production infrastructure. It's a helper tool for onboarding and workshops. I would not have had the time to build this on top of my day-to-day work without vibecoding it. And in my opinion the value it brings (removing onboarding friction) is higher than the cost of maintaining it, especially because maintenance will probably be vibemaintenance.

Side note: I used ChatGPT 5.3 codex (via open-code) for the alpha version, which worked well on macOS. To fix some bridged networking issues on Linux, I used Opus 4.5 (via cursor-agent).

This is also a follow-up to "Coding with AI: From Blank Canvas to Working App in a Day", which I wrote exactly 10 months ago. The level of improvement since then is insane. I can clearly see this becoming a de facto way of building many projects, and with the right guardrails, also for production code.