Engineering
How we build it.
The product manifesto says what MingLLM is. That lives here. This page is how. Five engineering principles that shape every architectural decision in the codebase.
The constraint is the product.
We chose local. Now we compound.
Picking a base model that fits in 8 GB of unified memory is not a temporary limitation we apologize for. It's the design center. Every layer — training corpus, MoE routing, inference kernels, the runtime, the product surfaces — is shaped by the constraint. Frontier scale is a liability when your product lives on a laptop. We get to win a different game.
Receipts before features.
If you can't see it, we shouldn't have done it.
Every action MingLLM takes lands in the receipts log before it exists in the UI. We do not ship a feature whose effects are invisible to the user. "Reviewable, reversible, yours" is not a tagline — it's a literal pre-flight check on every PR. If a tool can take an action that doesn't surface, the tool isn't done.
One canonical implementation.
Two ways to do anything is a bug.
Motion runtime, scroll smoothing, modal stack, command palette, form micro-states — each lives in exactly one place. We delete the second implementation when we find it. The cost of a duplicate is not the bytes; it's the slow drift between the two, and the cognitive tax of choosing.
Attribute-driven, not component-driven.
Markup carries the meaning.
Reveals, parallax, magnetic motion, tilt, cursor glow — all of it is `data-*` on the element that gets the effect, not a `<Reveal>` wrapper. Wrappers fragment the markup, force re-renders, and obscure intent. Attributes are zero-cost, scannable in a code review, and trivial to remove when the design changes.
Performance is non-negotiable.
Slow is a bug, not a tradeoff.
60fps on a 2020 MacBook Air. LCP under 2s on 4G. JS budget under 130 KB gzipped per route. Single rAF, single IntersectionObserver, single pointermove listener — registered once at boot, never per-component. The motion budget is not aspirational; it's enforced before merge.