Metrics and insights
Insights
What Kairos notices about your accounts and sessions — every kind of insight, what triggers it, act and note, the brief, insights written on the device, and Deeper insights.
Insights are what Kairos's own records say about your work, and what to try. They sit on Today under Insights, the ones worth acting on first. "Nothing stands out right now." when there is nothing to say.
Every insight is worked out on the Mac by arithmetic over what Kairos already keeps: the usage history, Claude Code's record of its requests, each session's resources, the week plan, the live sessions, Night Shift and work put off for later. No model is asked, nothing is sent anywhere, and an insight says nothing when the records are thin.
Act and note
Each insight is either act, worth doing something about now, or note, worth knowing. At most six show, the act ones first. Each says why, shows the numbers it is based on (often as a small chart), and offers what to do: open a screen, ask about it, put work off for later, or pause.
Every kind
In the order Kairos ranks them:
| Insight | When it shows |
|---|---|
| Sessions refused at a limit | Sessions were refused at a limit in the last 15 minutes, on a login that is not the account Kairos shows as active. Only times and reset times are read, never what was said. |
| Needs you | A session has waited on you (a permission, a question) for a minute or more. |
| The Mac is overloaded | The Mac's 15-minute load is over 1.5 times its cores, with the sessions using most of it, or a note that the load is not theirs. |
| A session is writing a lot | A session wrote 5 GB or more in the last hour; worth acting on from 20 GB, or when the disk has under 20 GB free. |
| Waiting at limits | How long sessions waited at usage limits this week, on which account and at what time of day. |
| Refusals | How many times sessions were refused at a limit, per account, and how long they sat refused. |
| Spare capacity | Hours of the day no session used any account, on most days, while the week plan expects capacity to reset unused, and when Night Shift could use them. |
| Pace | Where the week is heading, in one sentence, even when nothing is wrong. |
| A heavy session | A session averaged 1.5 cores or more over the last hour. |
| Idle memory | Sessions that used no CPU for half an hour while holding 1 GB or more. |
| Night Shift | What the last shift did, and how much of which week it used. |
| Written by Claude | With Deeper insights on, up to three insights Claude wrote from Kairos's numbers. |
The brief
At the top of Insights, a few plain sentences: Overnight before noon (since 18:00 the day before), Today so far after. The work in each busy repository (its sessions' requests, and the commits on its local branches with the files they changed), what Night Shift and later work did, waits at limits and account switches. At most five lines.
Written on the device
On a Mac or iPhone with Apple Intelligence, Kairos's app also writes insights with Apple's on-device model, from the same records, asking only the Mac's own engine. Without it: "Insights written on this Mac need Apple Intelligence; Kairos's own show meanwhile."
Questions to ask
Each insight suggests questions to Ask, for example "What is slowing my Mac?" under an overloaded Mac.
On older engines
"Insights need Kairos 2.0.16 or later on the Mac." See Updates.