Frequently asked questions

One question, one page, one answer you can stop reading after. The rest of this manual is organised by subsystem, which assumes you already know which subsystem your question belongs to; this section assumes you do not. Every answer here opens with the short version, then explains the mechanism, and ends by naming the page that goes into it properly.

How to use this section

Each page is a list of questions phrased the way a person types them rather than the way a manual is titled. Under each question there is a callout restating it with its answer in two sentences — if that is all you needed, stop there. Under the callout, Why gives the real explanation: the mechanism, the trade-off, the number, and the place where the answer is weaker than it sounds. Where the honest answer is "no" or "not yet", a warning callout says so and says why.

Four pages, in the order most people arrive at them:

Page	What is on it
What dev3d is, and is not	Whether it is a real application or a visualisation, what hardware it needs, whether it works offline, what the thirteen employees actually are, and what it deliberately is not.
Running it and paying for it	Which providers and models work, how to run it entirely on a local model, what it costs, what stops a runaway bill, and what happens when a provider is down.
Skills, plugins and the marketplace	The difference between a skill and a plugin, whether plugin code is sandboxed, what the marketplace review checks, and what a yanked version can and cannot reach.
The project, licensing and contributing	The licence and what it means for commercial work, whether it is production-ready, how to contribute, and where the source lives.

The questions people arrive with

This is the arrival table: the question as it is usually asked, and where the answer is. It is deliberately blunt, because the fastest way to lose a reader is to answer a different question than the one they asked.

You are asking	Read
Is this a real 3D application, or a dashboard with an office skin?	What dev3d is, and is not
Do I need a GPU?	What dev3d is, and is not
Does it work without an internet connection?	What dev3d is, and is not
Are the thirteen employees thirteen models?	What dev3d is, and is not
Does this replace a developer?	What dev3d is, and is not
Is it an IDE, or a wrapper around a chat model?	What dev3d is, and is not
Which providers and models can it use?	Running it and paying for it
Can I run it entirely on a local model?	Running it and paying for it
What does a run cost?	Running it and paying for it
What stops a runaway bill?	Running it and paying for it
What do I need installed, and on which operating systems?	Running it and paying for it
What happens when a provider goes down?	Running it and paying for it
What is the difference between a skill and a plugin?	Skills, plugins and the marketplace
Can I write a skill without knowing TypeScript?	Skills, plugins and the marketplace
Is plugin code sandboxed?	Skills, plugins and the marketplace
What does the marketplace review actually check?	Skills, plugins and the marketplace
Can I publish a plugin privately?	Skills, plugins and the marketplace
What happens to a version that gets yanked?	Skills, plugins and the marketplace
What licence is it under, and can I use it at work?	The project, licensing and contributing
Is it production-ready?	The project, licensing and contributing
How do I contribute, or report a security issue?	The project, licensing and contributing

What this section is not

It is not the reference, and it is not a substitute for reading the page it links to. Three things follow from that, and they are worth stating before you rely on an answer here.

• An FAQ answer is a summary, and a summary loses the caveat. Every answer on these four pages ends by naming the page that covers it in full. If a decision of yours depends on the detail — a default, an error string, whether a limit is enforced or merely documented — go to that page. The reference pages are maintained against the same source and are meant to be complete: Environment, Plugin manifest and The wire protocol.
• It is not the tutorial. Nothing here tells you how to install the office or get a run going. That is Quick start and Installation, and they are short.
• It is not a place to hide a limitation. The answers here are written to the same standard as the rest of the site: where something is unfinished, unverified or a deliberate trade, a warning callout says so rather than a paragraph of praise. Known gaps is the full list, and several questions here end with a link to it.

If the answer here is wrong

These pages describe dev3d as it is in the source, including the parts the project's own README gets wrong. That is a moving target: the code changes, and a page that described last month's behaviour accurately is still wrong today. If a page here contradicts the software you are running, that is a documentation bug and worth reporting — contact is the route, and the same form handles documentation errors, plugin reports and licensing questions.

One useful habit before you report anything: check the version. The counts and defaults on this site describe release 1.0.0, and a checkout ahead of the release can legitimately disagree with a figure here. The fix is to re-derive it rather than to assume which side is wrong, and Verification explains how each claim on this site was checked in the first place.

Still unanswered?

• Contact — a question the FAQ does not cover, a documentation error, or a plugin that does something its listing does not disclose.
• Documentation — the whole manual, grouped by section, with a reading path for each kind of reader.
• Introduction — what dev3d is, in one sitting, if you would rather have the shape of the thing than a list of answers.
• Known gaps — the limits stated in one place, which is where most "but does it…" questions end up.
• Use cases — what people actually point it at, if your question is really "is this for my problem".