Contributing

How Tau is developed, where the build journals live, and how to run the project locally.

Tau is built in small, documented phases — partly to ship a usable agent, partly so the codebase reads as a teaching example of how a coding agent is assembled.

The build journals

The detailed, phase-by-phase implementation notes, design docs, and architecture decision records live in the repository, under dev-notes/:

• dev-notes/design/ — the high-level design docs (00-roadmap, 01-architecture, …).
• dev-notes/architecture/ — per-phase build notes (phase-1 … phase-24), each answering: what was added, why it exists, how later phases use it.
• dev-notes/adr/ — architecture decision records.

These are intentionally not published on this site — they’re contributor material. The published docs distill the result; see How Tau works.

Roadmap

The published, phase-by-phase roadmap and status lives on the roadmap page. The underlying checklist is tracked in GitHub issue #1.

Running the project locally

git clone https://github.com/huggingface/tau.git
cd tau
uv sync --dev
uv run tau --version

Checks:

uv run pytest
uv run ruff check .
uv run ruff format --check .
uv run mypy

The docs site

The site (this site) is a Hugo project under website/:

cd website
hugo server -D    # http://localhost:1313/
hugo --minify     # static output in website/public/

User-facing docs live in website/content/; the landing and “Why Tau?” pages are website/content/_index.md and website/content/why-tau.md, rendered by templates in website/layouts/.

Documentation expectations

Each substantial phase should leave beginner-friendly notes in dev-notes/ explaining what was added, why it exists, how it maps to Pi’s design, and how to test or use it. When a feature is user-facing, also update or add the relevant page under website/content/.