> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.shamwari.ai/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# An AI companion that refuses to send your data away

> Shamwari is built in Zimbabwe, answers in Shona, Ndebele and English, and cites the actual provision of the actual statute. These pages explain how it works, including the parts that are deliberately impossible.

> A friend that serves; a friend that does not control.

Shamwari means *friend* in Shona. It is the community pillar of the Bundu Ecosystem, and it is a companion rather than a chatbot: it is meant to know things about your life, which is exactly why the rules about where your data can go are the most important thing on this site.

## Start here

Two constraints shape every other decision, and they are the two worth reading before anything else:

* [**The two rules**](/rules) — personal data never reaches a third-party model, and only open-weight output may train Shamwari Mind. Both are enforced in code in more than one place.
* [**Data scopes**](/scopes) — the distinction that matters in Shamwari is not how much you pay. It is whose data a question is about.

Then, if you want the mechanics:

* [**Architecture**](/architecture) — two services, drawn along one line.
* [**Routing and models**](/routing) — which model answers, and why the provenance of the answer is recorded at the moment it is generated.
* [**Ground and citation**](/ground) — how an answer about Zimbabwean law gets a section number attached to it.
* [**How we describe it**](/language) — the words we use, and the ones we refuse to, because the difference is load-bearing.

## What Shamwari is not

It is not a model we trained. Shamwari Cloud routes questions to models published by other people; Shamwari Mind, which runs on your device, is the one we train. Keeping those two straight is not modesty, it is the only version of the story that survives someone checking.


## Related topics

- [What concurrent traffic looks like](/traffic.md)
- [Three data scopes, not three tiers](/scopes.md)
- [Two rules that must not be broken](/rules.md)
- [How we describe it](/language.md)
- [Ground, and why citation is the whole point](/ground.md)