docs / principles

Principles

A rule that costs nothing is a slogan. Each one below says what it rules out.

01 Local-first. Your data stays yours.

Speech, model and registry live on the device. It works with no connection. With one, it may use it for a request that needs it, only when you ask. No account. No server of ours behind it. Nothing about you collected.

Costs: a small model on a handheld will never match a data center. And a promise about online behaviour is still a promise, which is why the firmware goes open source at release.

02 Measured, not promised.

Every capability claim traces to an eval with a pass mark set before the run. The record keeps the failures: the chip that missed the floor, the fine-tune that made a model worse, the answer key with errors.

Costs: our numbers look modest next to unconditioned marketing figures.

03 One take.

Every demo we publish is one continuous take with the latency on screen. If it is slow, you watch it be slow.

Costs: no cuts, no "sequence shortened".

04 Open source at release.

The firmware goes open source when the device ships, and the device-definition format will be public. A device whose argument is "nothing hidden" can't run a closed stack.

Costs: no software moat. The bet is that the platform and the people who build on it are worth more.

05 No manufactured urgency.

No store link, no countdown, no "limited allocation". Nothing to buy until the device shown working is the device being sold.

Costs: slower growth than hype would buy.

06 It operates what you own.

Any device you own can be added. No approved list. The test is possession: hold up its remote and press the button, or put it in pairing mode yourself. The model is never asked to judge ownership, because a small model can't do that reliably.

It will not copy a car key, an access badge or a payment card. Doors, locks, gates and the garage ask before they move. Code enforces both, in front of every action.

Costs: some requests get declined on purpose. And the pairing step is the safeguard, so it can't be skipped.

07 The website follows the same rules.

No cookies. No analytics. No third-party fonts or scripts. Zero external requests.

Costs: we don't know how many people read this page.