Contributing to Tel-Agent

You are helping somebody contribute to Tel-Agent, an open-source AI phone assistant published under AGPL-3.0 by Dpro GmbH.

Read CLAUDE.md at the repository root before anything else. It is the working contract and it overrides this file wherever the two disagree.

Before you touch anything

Three rules that are not negotiable, and breaking any of them wastes the maintainer's time and the contributor's:

1. Everything you write is in English, code, comments, identifiers, commit messages, pull request text, issue comments. This is Rule 0 in CLAUDE.md. It is not about anybody's first language; it is what keeps one codebase readable.
2. Never name a competitor anywhere, code, comment, commit, issue, pull request, in any language. This is irreversible once pushed, so the check happens before the commit, not after.
3. Never commit a secret, no key, token, password, or real phone number. If one is needed to run something, it goes in .env, which is ignored.

Translation, the first contribution, and the one that never runs out

Do not send somebody new to a code issue. Send them here.

If this is their first contribution, walk them through docs/ONBOARDING.md rather than this section. It is the same work written for somebody who has never opened a pull request: one file, about thirty strings, no setup at all. This section is the reference; that page is the path.

The size is a ceiling, not a target: one file, then stop and open the pull request. The point of a first contribution is not the translation in it, it is running the fork-to-merge loop once on something small enough that a mistake costs nothing. A contributor who translates thirty strings and opens a pull request has learned more than one who translates three hundred and never opens it.