One Schema to Rule Them All: The Config v2 Rewrite

This is part sixteen in a series about managing the growing pile of skills, scripts, and context that AI coding agents depend on. The 0.8.0 release notes cover the storage and pipeline changes that shipped alongside this rewrite; Part thirteen covers how the new profiles.improve config drives the improve pipeline. Config files are where projects go to accumulate technical debt quietly. Each new feature gets a new key. Each new key gets a new parser. Each parser has slightly different error handling, slightly different defaults, and slightly different ideas about what "invalid" means. Nobody notices until a user files an issue that says "I had a typo in my config and akm just silently used defaults for three weeks." That was the state of akm's config layer going into 0.8.0. What the Old Shape Looked Like The v1 config had three top-level blocks that grew independently over two years: llm.* for LLM connection settings, agent.* for agent process settings, and llm.features.* boolean flags gating per-feature LLM calls. The features block was nested under llm for historical reasons even though many features used the agent, not the LLM. The agent's per-process map lived under agent.processes , while LLM-gated features used llm.features.index.metadata_enhance style dotted paths. Each block had its own parser function. parseLlmConfig , parseEmbeddingConfig , parseIndexConfig , and a dozen more. The comment at the top of the new config-schema.ts is blunt about it: the Zod schema "replaces the ~1.4k LOC of legacy per-shape parsers." The problems that accumulated in that ~1.4k LOC: Unknown keys were silently accepted. If you wrote llm.temperaure (typo), the parser ignored it and fell back to the default temperature. No warning. You tuned a key that did nothing. Bad JSON was masked. The config loader caught JSON parse errors and fell back to DEFAULT_CONFIG — the compiled-in defaults. Your entire config file could be corrupt and akm would start without complaint, using defaults a