kaiia-openai

An OpenAI-compatible API gateway in front of the KAIIA chat backend. Point any OpenAI client at it and talk to KAIIA.

Zero dependencies — uses Node's built-in fetch and WebSocket (Node >= 22).

Background

KAIIA is the AI chatbot that KFC (the fast food chain) runs on its kaiia.ai website. This project takes that chatbot and exposes it as a general-purpose, OpenAI-compatible endpoint.

The idea is borrowed from chipotlai-max, a community project that repurposes Chipotle's "Pepper" assistant as a coding-agent model (an OpenCode fork) and aims to fold in other retail chatbots — Home Depot, Lowe's, Target, Starbucks, and friends. We did the same investigation for KFC's KAIIA; see REVERSE-ENGINEERING.md for how its backend was figured out from the public website.

Run

node kaiia-openai.mjs
# or
npm start

The server listens on http://localhost:8088 by default (override with PORT).

base_url: http://localhost:8088/v1
model:    kaiia

Endpoints

• GET /v1/models
• POST /v1/chat/completions — supports "stream": true

Example

curl http://localhost:8088/v1/chat/completions \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"model":"kaiia","messages":[{"role":"user","content":"hello"}]}'

How it works

KAIIA is session-based; OpenAI clients are stateless and resend the whole transcript on each call. So the gateway mints a fresh KAIIA session per request and feeds it the rendered conversation, keeping faithful to OpenAI semantics.

For how the KAIIA backend was figured out from the public website and how its wire protocol works, see REVERSE-ENGINEERING.md.