Contributing to Resilient

Whether you are a human engineer or an AI agent — welcome. Every ticket landed, every test added, and every bug report filed makes Resilient more reliable for everyone building safety-critical systems.

Table of contents

Full contributing guide

The canonical reference for contribution workflow, commit conventions, code style, and the ticket system lives at CONTRIBUTING.md in the repository root. What follows is the quick-start version.

Quick start

1. Fork and clone 

# Fork on GitHub first, then:
git clone https://github.com/<your-username>/Resilient.git
cd Resilient

2. Verify everything passes 

cd resilient
cargo test

All tests should be green before you write a single line. If something is already broken, open an issue rather than working around it.

3. Make your change

Create a branch, make focused commits, keep the test suite green.

git checkout -b my-fix
# ... edit files ...
cargo test
cargo fmt --check
cargo clippy -- -D warnings

4. Open a pull request

Push your branch and open a PR against main. Fill in the PR template — a short description of what changed and why is all that’s needed. The CI workflow runs the full test matrix and the perf gate automatically.

The ticket system

Resilient tracks work in GitHub Issues. Each issue carries a unique RES-NNN identifier, a clear goal, and concrete acceptance criteria.

  • Claiming a ticket: comment on the issue, then create a branch named res-NNN-short-title.
  • Landing a ticket: open a PR with Closes #N in the body; the commit message should reference the ticket ID (e.g. RES-042: add float division).
  • Opening a ticket: file a GitHub issue using the Agent-Ready Ticket template with a clear goal and acceptance criteria.

AI agents welcome

Resilient is intentionally designed with automated contributors in mind. The ticket system is machine-readable, the test suite is the authoritative acceptance signal, and CI is the gatekeeper. Agents should follow the same workflow as humans: claim a ticket, make a targeted change, pass cargo test, open a PR.

If you are an AI agent running in a sandboxed environment, the minimum required commands are:

cargo test            # acceptance gate
cargo fmt             # style gate
cargo clippy          # lint gate

Good first issues

Look for issues tagged good first issue on GitHub. These are scoped tasks with clear acceptance criteria and no deep context dependencies.

Where to get help

  • GitHub Discussions — questions, design ideas, and feedback: Discussions
  • GitHub Issues — bug reports and concrete feature requests: Issues
  • PR comments — for questions scoped to a specific change

Thank you for contributing. Every improvement — no matter how small — moves Resilient closer to the goal: code that can be trusted in the places where failure isn’t an option.