Contributing

Thanks for looking. Diarist is a small project with a few firm rules.

The rules

Nothing leaves the machine. No telemetry, no automatic network calls, no cloud fallback. A network request happens only when the user presses a button that says so (PRIVACY.md lists them all).
Nobody fights the app (docs/00-product-spec.md). No hard gates: every action says what it is missing and offers the fix. Every download has Retry, a copyable link, the expected hash and its folder. Every error message ends with a next step.
The user owns the folders. Models and runtimes are plain files; a file dropped into models\ or engine\ must work after Refresh.
Logic lives in crates/core, testable without a GUI. apps/desktop/src-tauri holds only Tauri command wrappers and event plumbing; the Svelte code only renders (docs/01-architecture.md).
Measured, not assumed. Claims about accuracy, speed or VRAM in docs and UI come from a measurement that is written down (docs/eval, docs/research).

Setting up

Prerequisites, build, test and run commands are in docs/DEV.md. In short, from the repository root:

cargo build --workspace
cargo test --workspace
cargo clippy --workspace --all-targets -- -D warnings
cargo fmt --all -- --check
cd apps/desktop && bun install && bun run build && bun run check

All of these must pass on every commit. Tests that need a GPU, the runtime, models or audio devices are skipped unless their environment variables are set (docs/DEV.md, "Gated tests").

Run the app against a scratch data folder so you never touch your real transcripts:

set DIARIST_DATA_DIR=%TEMP%\diarist-dev
bun run tauri build --debug --no-bundle
target\debug\diarist.exe

Changing types the UI sees

TypeScript types in apps/desktop/src/lib/generated/ are generated from Rust by ts-rs when the diarist-core tests run. Change the Rust type, run cargo test -p diarist-core, commit both. Never edit the generated files.

Pull requests

Small, focused commits with a message that says why.
New behaviour comes with a test in crates/core (or a written manual check for UI-only work).
Keep the docs true: if you change behaviour described in README.md, docs/INSTALL.md or docs/DEV.md, update them in the same pull request.

Reporting problems

Open an issue with what you did, what happened and what you expected. Paste the output of Diagnostics, Copy diagnostics: it lists versions, the GPU and driver, the selected models with hashes, the checklist and the last engine errors, and no transcript text.

By contributing you agree that your contribution is licensed under the MIT licence of this repository.