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Stella Engineering Wiki

Welcome to the internal engineering wiki for Stella, our agentic coding project. This is the home for everything the engineering team needs to build, ship, and operate Stella — architecture, conventions, runbooks, and institutional knowledge that doesn't belong in public docs.

What you'll find here

This wiki is the source of truth for how we work and how the system works internally:

• Architecture — system design, the agent loop, component boundaries, and key design decisions
• Development Guide — local setup, coding standards, testing, and the PR workflow
• Agent Design — prompt engineering, tool definitions, context management, and evaluation of agent behavior
• Operations & Runbooks — deployments, monitoring, incident response, and on-call procedures
• Decision Records — ADRs documenting why we built things the way we did
• Onboarding — start here if you're new to the team
• Glossary — shared vocabulary for Stella-specific and agentic-coding terms

How this differs from the public dev/API docs

	This wiki (internal)	Public dev/API docs
Audience	Stella engineers and contributors	External developers using Stella
Content	Internals, rationale, runbooks, works-in-progress	Stable, supported, public interfaces
Tone	Candid — includes known issues, trade-offs, and tech debt	Polished and versioned
Guarantees	None; may describe unreleased or changing behavior	Documented behavior is supported

Rule of thumb: if an external user needs it to use Stella, it belongs in the public docs. If an engineer needs it to build or operate Stella, it belongs here. Never paste internal details (infra names, credentials, unreleased features) into the public docs — and don't link public users to this wiki.

How to contribute

Everyone on the team can and should edit this wiki — stale docs are worse than no docs.

1. Small fixes: just edit the page directly (Edit button, top right). No review needed for typos, broken links, or factual corrections.
2. New pages: create the page, add it to the relevant pillar page and to _Sidebar so it's discoverable. Orphan pages get lost.
3. Substantial rewrites: drop a note in #stella-eng first so the page owner isn't surprised, or clone the wiki repo (git clone <repo-url>.wiki.git) and share a diff.
4. Conventions: use Title-Case-With-Hyphens page names, start every page with a one-paragraph summary, date-stamp anything time-sensitive ("As of July 2026…"), and prefer linking to code over copying it.

If you notice something wrong and can't fix it right away, mark it: > ⚠️ **Stale?** <what looks wrong> at the top of the section.

How to get the most out of the wiki

• Search first — use the wiki search bar; page titles follow predictable naming so keyword searches usually land.
• Start from pillar pages — the seven pages linked above index everything else; browse from there rather than the flat page list.
• Trust but verify dates — check the "last edited" timestamp; for anything operational, the runbook is authoritative only if it's been touched recently.
• Leave a trail — solved a gnarly problem? Spent an hour figuring something out? Write it down here so the next person spends five minutes instead.

Quick links

• Onboarding — new to the team? Start here
• Development Guide — set up your environment
• Operations & Runbooks — something's on fire
• Decision Records — "why is it like this?"

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Maintained by the Stella engineering team. Questions? Ask in #stella-eng.