We will be holding a live discussion & QA pertaining to the Hye Ararat Rewrite in the coming days. This will be highly technical, and the in-depth discussion & community input this brings will shape the fundamental architecture & roadmap Ararat will take before the rewrite is foundationally started.
If you are interested in attending, please fill out this timesheet to help us determine the optimal time/date for this to occur. I want as many of you as possible to be able to participate. Once that’s been finalized, I’ll reply with the information here. You can participate using the YouTube live chat, or speak/hold conversation directly via Zoom.
This is the best way to successfully pull off the goals of the rewrite, as many of the decisions being deliberated are with the goal of making the codebase highly maintainable for the community and easy to adapt as Incus matures. The input of those planning to contribute to Hye Ararat in particular is highly valuable for this purpose. The inaugural post of the Hye Ararat Rewrite thread goes into more detail on what the new development model requires.
Top of Mind at The DQA
The architecture I’m leaning towards opens the door to some radically new opportunities:
- It will potentially open the door for both 3rd & 1st-party Incus integrations to render & extend Ararat without modifying its code. If you maintain Incus tooling that would benefit from a web interface, definitely attend because I want to discuss this with you. Think of Ararat as your framework.
- Since the core logic will be de-coupled from the UI, Ararat no longer has to be shackled to building just a web interface. The same underlying logic can be shared to build both mobile apps and rich LLM integrations.
If you have any interest in contributing to Ararat, definitely attend. We’ll be diving into all sorts of topics, all of which I want your input on, including:
- What changed in the prior unpublished rewrite of Ararat, what ultimately blocked its continued maintenance, and how we are applying what we learned from this to the new foundation.
- What the new Ararat contribution guidelines are going to look like & the tooling we’re building to make compliance easy.
- Using AI tools with your Ararat contributions, including the varying scopes in which their use is permitted, how we’re setting up the repository in a way that fosters high-signal interactions with these tools (including skills, instructions, and packaging), and what we’ve learned from past AI use in Ararat.
If you are a current Ararat user or have an interest in using Ararat in the future, we’ll also be touching on topics relevant to you, including:
- New features that are currently on the roadmap (beyond Beta 5).
- Current features that are going away, but will make a comeback as Incus adds upstream functionality.
- Decisions baked into the rewrite that prevent major refactors from happening in the future, and stops substantial roadmap blockage in its tracks.
- What a shift from
incus-ui-canonicalto Hye Ararat would look like for you in the future.
A Closing Note
Ararat has been almost exclusively maintained by me. The prior foundation that carried us to Beta 4 was built by me over the course of ~6 months of work before I released it to this community with Beta 1. From there, one-man velocity was sustainable with that already-built core, however, it’s a completely different ballgame to rebuild and re-architect everything with a rewrite. The rewrite we just had to scrap only outpaced that ~6 month run because since early May I’ve been able to allocate ~60 hours/week to Hye. Towards the end of next month, I’ll be in university again (unless something changes at Hye, we are actively trying to get resources to avoid this), so I’ll only have ~20-30 hours/week for Ararat (and that doesn’t account for exams). I don’t think any of us want to wait another ~4 months just to get to where we were at in Beta 4. So, if you have the skills, knowledge, and interest to collaborate on Ararat, your collaboration will make an immense difference on the state & velocity of the mission, and less importantly to my life 
. What I said here I think articulates this best.
It’s important to emphasize that despite the challenges we have faced, the underlying principles, architectural plans, and long-term vision for Ararat have never been more mature. Even if I remain the only contributor, my commitment to this is unwavering and I will produce this no matter how long it takes or what roadblocks stand in the way. I’m looking forward to having a productive DQA with you.