Knowledge Driven Development
What is Knowledge Driven Development?
Knowledge Driven Development (KDD) is an approach to building software where the knowledge behind a system — why it exists, what it does, how it is built and how it evolves — is treated as a first-class asset, kept close to the code and updated as the system changes. It draws on long-standing ideas in software engineering and knowledge management: capturing decisions, preserving context, and reducing the gap between what a team knows and what the codebase records.
KDD is not a concept invented by Kaddo. It is a prior idea that Kaddo builds upon.
Relationship with Kaddo
Kaddo did not invent Knowledge Driven Development.
Kaddo provides a practical implementation of KDD principles for AI-assisted software development — for the era of LLMs, agents and modern repositories.
Where KDD is a philosophy, Kaddo is a concrete toolkit: a deterministic CLI plus agent prompt packs that operationalize KDD so that business knowledge, product thinking, technical decisions and delivery workflows stay connected to the code.
Knowledge layers
Kaddo organizes a project’s knowledge into four macro layers:
Business → Product → Tech → Delivery- Business — why it exists.
- Product — what we build.
- Tech — how we build it.
- Delivery — how we evolve it.
Knowledge maturity
Knowledge grows progressively, recognized by meaning (front-matter type), not file names:
Consolidated → Structured → TraceableHuman-in-the-loop
Knowledge guides development, but critical decisions stay human. Kaddo’s CLI is deterministic and never calls an LLM; the agents run in your chat and propose, while a human confirms. Kaddo never commits, pushes or merges on its own.
Why it matters for the AI era
AI agents build on assumptions when they lack context. By keeping minimum sufficient knowledge next to the code — and packaging it deterministically for an LLM — Kaddo lets agents work on real knowledge rather than giant, noisy prompts.
See the Manifesto for the full philosophy, and About for the project’s origin and author.