Build logs

Draft recovery

Every draft is saved on your machine the moment it's written, and stays until you publish or discard it. You can walk away at any point and pick up where you left off.

How drafts are kept#

Saved as soon as it’s generated. The draft is written to disk before it’s even shown to you.
Each edit is saved as you make it.
Written once per commit. Reopening a draft doesn’t ask the AI to write another one, so your edits are never replaced.
Entirely local. Drafts live in the drafts/ folder beside your credentials (see where the CLI keeps its files). Nothing reaches Kairo until you publish.

Reopening a draft#

Run kairo review again in the same repository, on the same commit:

kairo review

  ada/lighthouse  main

  79de83c  Add the AI writer
           Ada Lovelace · committed 20 minutes ago · 9 files, +612 -14

✓ Project Lighthouse
  Found an existing draft for this commit.
  Opening…
✓ Draft restored from cache.

  Generated   24 Sept 2026, 14:03 (20 minutes ago)
  Model       not reported by Kairo
  Edited      12 minutes ago

The draft comes back exactly as you left it, edits included, followed by the usual [P] Publish [E] Edit [D] Discard menu.

What happens when…#

…the terminal is closed

The draft is already on disk. Open a new terminal in the repository and run kairo review.

…you press Ctrl+C

At the draft menu, or while editing:

  Stopped. Nothing was published.
  Your draft is saved. `kairo review` opens it again.

If you press Ctrl+C while the draft is still being generated, the review stops with nothing saved — there was no draft yet. The next kairo review generates one.

…publishing fails

You stay on the same draft, with the error underneath it. Press P to try again, or E to change it. Retrying is safe: Kairo keeps one build log per commit, so a publish that got through before the connection dropped isn’t duplicated.

…there’s no terminal to answer

In CI or a pipe, kairo review prints the draft and stops without publishing. The draft is saved, and opens again the next time you run it in a terminal.

When a saved draft is deleted#

You…	Then
Publish it	The saved draft is deleted. The build log now lives on Kairo.
Discard it	The saved draft is deleted. Run `kairo review` again for a fresh draft of the same commit.
Review a commit that already has a build log	Any saved draft for it is deleted, and the CLI prints the existing build log’s link.
Make a new commit	The next `kairo review` generates a new draft for the new commit, which replaces the old one.

A damaged or deleted draft#

If the saved file can’t be read, you get a new draft instead of an error. Deleting the drafts/ folder is always safe — the next review simply writes a new draft.