How Varve is built

I make Varve on my own. You should know how it's made before you trust it with your work.

The short version

I build Varve with a lot of help from AI coding assistants. I decide what Varve should be, design it, direct the work, review and test it, and I'm responsible for every change that ships. AI tools write a large share of the code and docs.

Where AI helps

Code: a large share of the code in the TypeScript editor, the Rust engine and the desktop shell was first drafted by AI, then reviewed, reworked and tested by me.
Tests, tooling and docs: much of the test suite, the build and release scripts and the documentation were made the same way.
Tools: Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Devin, opencode and Windsurf. The repository's AI-assisted development notes describe how they're set up.

Commits don't carry AI co-author tags. Some AI tools add a "Co-authored-by" line or a "Generated with" signature to the commits they help with. Earlier Varve commits had those lines. I removed them from the Git history with git-filter-repo, and a commit hook and a CI check now block them. I did this so I'm the only author on record, because I'm accountable for every line. This page is the disclosure instead, and the removal is recorded in the repository's provenance report.

What I do myself

Product decisions, scope, interface design, what ships and when, and hands-on testing on my own Linux machine (CachyOS).

How quality is checked

Nothing is trusted just because a tool wrote it. Every push to the main branch runs CI on the parts it affects: Rust and TypeScript tests, browser tests against the real canvas, visual comparisons and a WebAssembly build. The full suite runs weekly. At the 0.5.0 checkpoint that meant 1,903 browser test cases and 1,909 unit test files.

Releases are built in CI from the exact tagged commit and must pass candidate certification. The installed app is then checked on Linux, Windows and macOS (upgrade, save and reopen, export) before publishing. Every release ships SHA-256 checksums, SBOMs and build provenance. Installers aren't code-signed yet.

Icons, fonts, logo and images

Interface icons come from open-source sets (Lucide, Phosphor, Tabler). The fonts are Geist, IBM Plex Sans and Fraunces. Credits and licences are in THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.
The wordmark is outlined from the Fraunces typeface, and a script renders the app icons from one master SVG.
Screenshots and recordings are captured from the running app and never hand-edited.
One sample image on this site, the expanded landscape photo on the Generative Editing page, was made with Varve's own on-device AI edit tool. It's labelled that way where it appears.

Licence and contributions

Varve is source-available under FSL-1.1-MIT, and each release becomes MIT two years after it ships. AI help doesn't change that: I'm the sole author of record and review everything that goes in. External code contributions are paused. When they reopen, contributors will sign off their work (DCO) and be responsible for its provenance, licence, tests and quality, AI-assisted or not.

The AI inside Varve is separate

Varve's own AI features are optional and run on your device. They include background removal, object selection, image enhancement (denoise, deblur and upscale), and Fill, Remove and Expand in Generative Edit. Larger models download only when you ask. There's no Varve-hosted AI service, and none of these features sends your images to an online service. Nothing in Varve 0.5.0 generates images from a text prompt.

Questions

Ask in GitHub Discussions or email hello@varve.studio. If anything here is wrong, tell me and I'll fix it.

Kevin