The site, the author, the agreement.
How Tessera is built, who built it, and the terms under which the receipts and the pipeline are shared.
A single architect, sustained.
Tessera is independently developed by Julian Torres. The architecture is a sustained argument that the LLM deployment stack's abstractions are inadequate, and that the right response is a different one. The argument is not a vision document; it is a calibrator, a quantizer, an artifact format, a fitness signal against the kernel, a C++ pipeline, a macOS app, and a constitutional model for receipts.
How this site is built.
This site is Tessera Observatory v1: the evidence-bound public projection of Tessera. The bootstrap is hand-authored HTML, CSS, and JSON, with the convention that every page is a typed chapter composed from a small set of design tokens.
The design system is Observatory: dark by default, single-family typography (the system stack at bootstrap; a self-hosted family when the slot is filled), instrument-panel density, monospace for identities and machine state. The accent identity is shared with prism-engine.tribunus.dev — both projects are by the same architect on the same domain, and the visual identity is the shared brand.
No third-party requests of any kind. No Google Fonts, no analytics that ship synchronously, no CDN-loaded images. The visitor's browser fetches everything from the same origin as the page.
What runs behind this page.
| Layer | Choice |
|---|---|
| Source | Hand-authored partials in site/src/ (see site/src/partials/ and site/src/pages/); site/*.html is the generated output checked in for deploy readability. |
| Build | Assembler site/scripts/build.py (stdlib Python, no deps). Run python3 site/scripts/build.py to regenerate; --check verifies no drift in CI. The future tessera-docs-ssg binary will replace this assembler when typed content moves beyond hand-authored pages. |
| Hosting | GitHub Pages (legacy), custom domain tessera.tribunus.dev via the CNAME file at docs/CNAME, served from the /docs directory on main. |
| Deploy | Push to main — the built site is published into docs/ and GitHub Pages rebuilds. The earlier Actions workflow (deploy.yml, actions/deploy-pages) was retired when the Pages source moved to main /docs. |
| Theme | Dark by default, light opt-in via a header button, FOUC-free inline init, prefers-color-scheme fallback, localStorage override. |
| Accessibility | Skip link, focus ring, aria-current on the active nav, prefers-reduced-motion respected, WCAG 2.2 contrast targets. |
The terms under which the work is shared.
The Tessera code is released under the project's open-source license. The shipped calibration artifacts (the GGUFs, the sidecar JSONs) are released under the same terms as the model they were quantized from, unless the model is the project's own. The Tessera calibration corpus is CC0 procedural text; the multimodal corpus is CC BY 4.0; see the corpus README for the per-source attribution.
The contribution path is the repository. Issues, pull requests, and discussion are the surface. The proprietary models remain confidential where an engagement requires it. The receipt is recorded either way.