How HokAI works, with the dates

By Damien, Founder and editor

Last updated 11 October 2026

One graph, six record types

A record on HokAI is one of six things: a tool, an agent, a skill, a model, a company or a service. They are not six lists. An agent record names the models it runs on and the skills it plugs into. A skill record, which is where MCP servers and connectors live, names the agents that can call it. A model record names its maker, and the company record lists everything that maker ships. A guide links the records it discusses, and each record lists the guides that discuss it.

That is what lets a reader move from a question to a decision without leaving the evidence behind: from the guide to the record, from the record to the company, from the company to the model, and from any of them to the alternatives.

The matcher reads the whole graph

Smart Match is the product. You describe your work, it asks a few short questions, and it returns up to three picks with the reason each one is on the list. It reasons over every active record of every type, so a skill or a model can be the right answer when a visitor arrived thinking they needed a tool. No vendor can pay to appear in the picks or to move up in them.

An endpoint agents can call

The directory is also available to agents directly. The HokAI MCP server at hokai.io/mcp has been live since July 2026 and has been listed in the official Model Context Protocol registry as io.hokai/hokai since 29 July 2026. An agent that speaks MCP can search the directory and read a record the same way a reader does, which is how the graph above ends up inside other people’s assistants. Our record of what MCP is and how to connect one is in the docs.

When each part went live

• March 2026. HokAI opens with the tools section and Smart Match: one record per product, with pricing read from the vendor's own page, a checked date and alternatives, and a matcher that asks a few questions and names the picks.
• April 2026. Agents, skills and services become their own record types. A skill is a capability an agent plugs into: an MCP server, a connector, a plugin. A service is the infrastructure a stack runs on.
• May 2026. Models and companies join as record types. A model page names its maker; a company page lists every model, tool and agent it ships. From here every record links to the others it depends on.
• June 2026. Smart Stack goes live on 11 June: the tools you run, what the set costs together, where it overlaps, and a compare tab across records. Smart Match now reasons over every record type, not only tools.
• July 2026. The HokAI MCP server goes live at hokai.io/mcp, so an agent can search and read the directory directly. It is published to the official MCP Registry as io.hokai/hokai on 29 July 2026, and its source is public.
• August 2026. The Guides section replaces the daily pulse as the editorial surface. Every guide links the records it discusses, and every record lists the guides that discuss it.
• September 2026. Korean, Swedish and Spanish editions, each written from the English facts rather than translated sentence by sentence.
• October 2026. Each record shows its last dated changes, and the weekly page collects every change across the directory.

Dates are the month each section first served pages on hokai.io. The MCP Registry date is the day the listing was verified. Nothing here is a plan: a line is added when the thing is live.

What changes, and when

A record carries one visible checked date, and it moves only when a person or a source-checking routine has compared the record to the vendor’s own pages. A rewrite for clarity does not move it. Each record also shows its last dated changes, and the weekly page collects every dated change across the directory: releases, pricing moves, new features and deprecations, each with its source.

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