LinchKit, AI-Ready

Over the past decade, I’ve experienced all the common pitfalls of enterprise software: chaotic outsourcing projects, unmaintainable systems, tightly coupled codebases. Beneath these issues lies a fundamental lack of a unified, extensible, type-safe framework.

That’s why I created LinchKit — a modular, AI-ready, schema-first development framework for modern enterprise systems.

✨ Why LinchKit?

In enterprise development, we keep reinventing the wheel: permissions, form builders, report exports, workflow engines, approval processes, dashboards… Every company, every project builds similar systems that are rarely compatible or reusable. Traditional development approaches fail to scale or accumulate knowledge effectively.

At the same time, AI is unlocking unprecedented possibilities for enterprise systems: We can build assistants that understand context, configure operations via natural language, and interpret rules based on embedded institutional knowledge.

But only if our systems are architected with this in mind.

🔧 What is LinchKit?

LinchKit is a modular TypeScript framework tailored for enterprise application development, designed with the following core principles:

• AI-First: Built from the ground up with AI in mind — enabling AI integration across the framework, applications, and plugin development: semantic parsing, data interpretation, natural language interfaces, etc.
• Schema-First: All business entities are defined via schema, supporting field-level config, validation, relationships, permissions, and UI metadata.
• Type-Safe: Leveraging Zod and TypeScript inference to ensure end-to-end consistency and a smooth developer experience.
• Plugin-Based: Feature modules (auth, workflow, dashboards, reports, files, notifications, etc.) can be registered as needed, enabling a true “enterprise OS” experience.
• Driven by Real-World Needs: Every feature is distilled from real use cases, emphasizing maintainability, portability, and long-term evolution.

🧱 Key Architecture Concepts

1. Schema First: The Source of Truth

At the heart of LinchKit is the @linch-kit/schema module, which defines entity fields, validation rules, UI hints, permissions, relationships, and more — all through a single schema definition. This can power database modeling, form rendering, API validation, and AI context.

const User = defineEntity('User', {
  id: z.string().uuid(),
  name: z.string(),
  email: z.string().email(),
  role: z.enum(['admin', 'user']),
})

2. Type-Safe: Unified Across Frontend & Backend

All modules use Zod + TypeScript for type inference, avoiding manual mismatches and boosting dev speed. Combined with tRPC, you get seamless end-to-end type flow.

2. Plugin Architecture: Modular & Composable

LinchKit comes with a built-in plugin system supporting unified registration of hooks, permissions, UI, events, workflows, and models. Plugins are decoupled yet composable.

Examples include:

• workflow plugin: Graph-based workflows + approval logic + permission binding
• report plugin: SQL + schema + dynamic visualization
• ai plugin: Knowledge base, Q&A, rule interpreter

2. Ready: Vectors + Context Cache + Structured Knowledge

LinchKit offers built-in support for AI capability registration (e.g., via pgvector) and leverages schema definitions to inject structured context for model reasoning — significantly reducing hallucinations.

• Build institutional knowledge bases using pgvector
• Annotate entity fields as “context hints” or “restricted outputs”
• Use AI to help generate queries, reports, and rule explanations