How to contribute

llama.cpp is maintained by a small group of collaborators on top of a much larger pool of one-off contributors. The project deliberately keeps its review bar high, so it pays to read the contributor docs before opening a PR.

Required reading

File	Purpose
CONTRIBUTING.md	Pull request format, coding rules, naming conventions, the AI policy
AGENTS.md	Detailed AI usage policy (mirrored on CLAUDE.md)
CODEOWNERS	Per-path code owners — your reviewers
docs/build.md	Reference build instructions for every backend
tools/server/README.md	Server scope and feature catalog
docs/development/HOWTO-add-model.md	The end-to-end recipe for adding a new model architecture

AI policy summary

This project does not accept pull requests that are fully or predominantly AI-generated. AI tools may be utilized solely in an assistive capacity.

Concretely:

1. Disclose AI assistance when you used it.
2. Be able to explain every line you submitted, without AI help.
3. Do not use AI to write PR descriptions, commit messages, or replies to reviewers.
4. AI-implemented features the contributor does not understand will be closed.

The full text is in AGENTS.md. The wiki you are reading is a documentation artifact uploaded to Factory cloud — it is not a contribution to the repo and does not violate the policy.

Sub-pages

• Development workflow — branch, build, test, PR.
• Testing — what ctest covers and how to run the long-form CI.
• Debugging — logging, common failure modes, useful tools.
• Patterns and conventions — coding style, naming, error handling.
• Tooling — the build system, lint and format tools, generators.

Definition of done

A PR is ready when it satisfies all of the following (the list is the union of CONTRIBUTING.md, the .github/pull_request_template.md, and what reviewers actually ask for):

• Builds cleanly with cmake --build build on at least one platform you care about.
• Runs ctest --test-dir build --output-on-failure clean.
• If ggml/ was touched, tests/test-backend-ops.cpp passes for the backends you support.
• If a new model or quant type is added, you have run llama-perplexity and llama-bench and posted comparison numbers (see CONTRIBUTING.md).
• The PR title is in the form <module> : <commit title> (#<issue_number>).
• The PR description is human-written and concise.
• You have searched existing issues and PRs for duplicates.
• For new contributors: only one open PR at a time.

For per-subsystem ownership see Maintainers.