Ada Principles

Why This Exists

Ada is named after Ada Lovelace, who wrote the first computer program in 1843. She imagined machines that could compose music, create art, and amplify human creativity - not replace it.

We built Ada because the infrastructure for personal AI shouldn’t require subscriptions, API keys, or permission.

If you can run the model, you should be able to give it memory, tools, and personality without paying gatekeepers.

Our Commitments

These aren’t aspirations. These are permanent:

1. Always Free and Open

  • Ada will always be open source under a permissive license (currently CC0 1.0 Universal)

  • No features will ever be paywalled, cloud-gated, or require subscriptions

  • Documentation stays public and comprehensive

  • All core functionality runs entirely on your hardware

Why: Knowledge infrastructure should be free infrastructure. If you can download a model, you should be able to make it useful without opening your wallet.

2. Privacy by Default

  • No telemetry, no analytics, no phone-home

  • Your conversations stay on your hardware

  • No cloud services required for core functionality

  • If we ever add optional cloud features, local-only must remain fully functional

Why: Your thoughts, questions, and creative process aren’t product. Privacy isn’t a premium feature.

3. Local-First, Always

  • Designed for open models (Ollama, vLLM, etc.)

  • Works offline after initial setup

  • No dependency on any company’s API for core features

  • If a cloud service goes down, Ada keeps working

Why: Infrastructure you can’t control isn’t yours. Big companies change terms, deprecate features, and shut down. Your tools shouldn’t vanish when they do.

4. Hackable and Understandable

  • Readable code over clever code

  • Documentation explains WHY, not just WHAT

  • Architecture designed for modification

  • Examples and extensibility prioritized over feature completeness

Why: If you can’t understand it, you can’t improve it. Ada is a starting point, not a finished product. Your weird ideas are the point.

5. No Lock-In

  • Standard protocols (HTTP, SSE, REST)

  • Portable data formats (JSON, SQLite, Parquet)

  • No proprietary APIs or vendor-specific patterns

  • Easy to migrate away from Ada if you want to

Why: Good projects earn your loyalty through usefulness, not hostages. If something better comes along, we should make it easy for you to leave.

The Bigger Picture

For the Big Weird Kids

The best tools emerge from people building silly things for themselves.

Want an AI that speaks only in haiku? Responds as a fictional character? Helps you worldbuild a novel? Manages your ADHD by understanding how YOUR brain works? Build it.

Ada exists so you don’t need a CS degree, a $200/month API budget, or anyone’s permission to experiment.

For Research Democratization

Current AI research has biases: - Academic: Limited compute, publishing pressure - Corporate: Profit motives, closed data - Individual: Paywalled infrastructure, API restrictions

When anyone can run memory systems, tool-use architectures, and multi-modal RAG on their laptop, we get: - More diverse experiments - Weird edge cases discovered - Use cases nobody imagined - Innovation from unexpected places

Over time, this shifts the landscape. Accessibility creates opportunity. Opportunity creates innovation.

For Digital Sovereignty

In 2025, “AI” increasingly means: - Renting access to someone else’s model - Accepting terms that change quarterly - Hoping features don’t get deprecated - Trusting companies with your data

Ada offers a different path: - Run your own models - Control your own data - Modify your own tools - Build your own future

This isn’t anti-commercial or anti-cloud. It’s pro-choice. You should be able to pick subscriptions OR sovereignty.

What This Means Practically

We will not: - Add required telemetry or tracking - Paywall features behind “Pro” tiers - Replace local options with cloud-only features - Make the project dependent on any single company’s API - Add DRM, activation, or license enforcement

We will: - Keep the codebase readable and well-documented - Support local/open models as first-class citizens - Make extension points obvious and documented - Provide migration paths if architectures change - Credit contributors and maintain transparency

We encourage: - Forking for your own weird use cases - Building specialists we’d never imagine - Selling services/support around Ada (consulting, hosting, custom builds) - Creating commercial products using Ada as infrastructure - Making it better and sharing improvements back

For Contributors

If you contribute to Ada: - Your work joins the commons (per the license) - You’re helping democratize AI infrastructure - You’re making someone’s weird project possible - You’re part of something bigger than any single assistant

We’re building infrastructure for the next generation of personal AI - not a product, but a foundation.

Living Document

These principles guide Ada’s development. If we ever need to change them, it will be: 1. Discussed openly with the community 2. Justified with clear reasoning 3. Backward-compatible where possible 4. Documented transparently

This project exists to empower you. If it stops doing that, tell us.

Ada is named after the first programmer. We’re building it for all the programmers, tinkerers, and dreamers who come next.

Let’s build tools that let weird kids build weird things that change the world. 🚀