Thanks for your interest in improving tao. This project keeps a single source of truth for how the repo is built and shaped, so this guide stays short and points you at it.
Read AGENTS.md first. It describes the package layout, the
documentation boundaries between the README, AGENTS.md, and the docs/ files,
and the behavior that must be preserved when editing. Both humans and agents
follow it, so changes should respect those boundaries rather than duplicating
reference material across documents.
Use the Makefile — run make help to list the targets. The common
ones are:
make build— compile the binary.make test— run the test suite.make lint— run the linters.
Run make build, make lint, and make test before opening a pull request.
tao deliberately has zero third-party dependencies. Please do not add any new
ones: introducing a third-party module requires explicit approval from a project
owner before it can be merged. CI enforces this with make verify-no-deps, which
fails if go.mod gains any dependency beyond the main module, so run it locally
before opening a pull request.
Never commit Tao data-home contents or workspace-local .tao/ metadata; these
are local-only artifacts. See AGENTS.md for the full list and the rules that
apply when committing manually.