K8Lens started as a Friday-afternoon hack at a previous gig. The platform team had spent four engineering-weeks getting kube-prometheus-stack stable across three clusters, and someone said: “I just want to see if my pods are running.”
So we wrote a single binary. It read the kubeconfig and talked to the API server. It had no agents, no operators, no CRDs. It was 60MB and started in under a second.
Two years and forty-two releases later, K8Lens is a community project used by teams running everything from k3s on a Raspberry Pi to 400-node EKS fleets. It's still 60MB. It still starts in under a second. It is still, and will always be, Apache 2.0.