Barkly Labs Developer Community Automation
Functional Requirements Specification (FRS)
Project: Barkly Labs Developer Community Automation Version: 1.0 Status: Proposed Purpose: Automate community engagement and communication while accommodating the founder's disabilities and development workflow.
1. Project Overview
The Barkly Labs Developer Community Automation system is a locally hosted AI-powered tool designed to assist with community management, developer engagement, and project communications.
The system shall use a locally hosted Small Language Model (SLM) to generate authentic, founder-style community posts based on project activity, development progress, announcements, and configured community goals.
The primary objective is to reduce the administrative and executive-function burden associated with maintaining an active developer community while allowing the founder to focus on software development.
1.1 Design Principles
Local-first processing and privacy.
Human oversight and control.
Accessibility and disability-inclusive operation.
Minimal administrative overhead.
Authentic founder voice preservation.
Modular and extensible architecture.
No requirement for continuous founder availability.
2. System Scope
2.1 In Scope
The system shall support:
Local LLM integration through Ollama.
Founder writing-style configuration.
Project activity ingestion.
Context-aware community post generation.
Draft storage and management.
Human review and approval.
Scheduled publishing.
Community platform integration.
Generation history and audit logging.
Configurable automation policies.
2.2 Out of Scope for Initial Release
Fully autonomous conversations with community members.
Autonomous moderation or member bans.
Autonomous financial transactions.
Publishing without configured authorization.
Training or fine-tuning a model without user approval.
Managing unrelated personal social media accounts.
3. Functional Requirements
FR-001: Local Language Model Integration
The system shall integrate with a locally hosted LLM through the Ollama API.
The system shall:
Allow configuration of the Ollama endpoint.
Allow selection of an installed model.
Verify model availability before generation.
Support configurable inference parameters.
Handle unavailable models and connection failures gracefully.
Permit model replacement without requiring application redesign.
FR-002: Founder Voice Configuration
The system shall maintain a configurable founder voice profile.
The profile shall include:
Preferred vocabulary and expressions.
Typical capitalization and punctuation.
Sentence length and writing patterns.
Emotional tone and enthusiasm.
Technical communication preferences.
Accessibility and community values.
Examples of previously written posts.
The system shall use the profile and approved writing samples as generation context.
The system shall not claim that a model has learned or permanently memorized the founder's writing style unless actual model training has occurred.
FR-003: Project Context Management
The system shall maintain information about Barkly Labs projects.
Each project record shall support:
Project name.
Description.
Repository or documentation URL.
Current development status.
Recent changes.
Milestones.
Known challenges.
Public-facing information.
Visibility and disclosure restrictions.
The system shall allow manual context entry and configurable integrations for retrieving project activity.
FR-004: Development Activity Ingestion
The system shall be capable of collecting development activity from configured sources.
Potential sources include:
Git repository commits.
GitHub issues and pull requests.
Project changelogs.
Development notes.
Markdown documentation.
Manually entered progress updates.
The system shall normalize collected information into a structured project activity record.
The system shall exclude secrets, credentials, private user data, and explicitly restricted information from generation context.
FR-005: Context-Aware Post Generation
The system shall generate community posts using:
Founder voice profile.
Project information.
Recent development activity.
Selected community platform.
Post type.
Desired communication objective.
Relevant community context.
Supported initial post types shall include:
Development progress updates.
Project announcements.
Feature demonstrations.
Community questions.
Technical explanations.
Calls for contributors.
Milestone celebrations.
Project roadmaps.
The system shall generate one or more candidate drafts when requested.
FR-006: Draft Management
The system shall save generated posts as drafts before publication.
Each draft shall contain:
Unique identifier.
Generated content.
Associated project.
Target platform.
Generation timestamp.
Source activity references.
Model identifier.
Approval status.
Revision history.
The system shall allow the founder to edit, regenerate, approve, reject, archive, and delete drafts.
FR-007: Human Approval Workflow
The system shall provide a human approval workflow.
The system shall:
Require explicit approval before publishing by default.
Allow editing before approval.
Allow regeneration with additional instructions.
Display the intended destination before publication.
Record approval and publication timestamps.
Prevent rejected drafts from being published.
Support configurable automation policies for specific low-risk content categories.
FR-008: Scheduled Publishing
The system shall allow approved posts to be scheduled for future publication.
The system shall support:
Configurable date and time.
Time zone selection.
Draft cancellation.
Schedule modification.
Publication status tracking.
Retry policies for transient failures.
Duplicate-publication prevention.
The system shall not publish a post that has not satisfied its configured approval requirements.
FR-009: Community Platform Integration
The system shall provide a modular integration layer for community platforms.
The initial implementation shall prioritize Discord.
The integration shall support, where permitted by platform APIs:
Destination selection.
Message publishing.
Publication result tracking.
Authentication management.
Connection verification.
API error handling.
Additional platforms shall be supported through modular adapters without requiring changes to the core generation system.
FR-010: Background Processing
The system shall support asynchronous processing for:
Project activity collection.
Context updates.
Post generation.
Scheduled publishing.
Retry operations.
Background tasks shall not require the founder to keep the user interface open.
The system shall expose task status, including queued, processing, completed, failed, and cancelled.
FR-011: Founder Dashboard
The system shall provide a dashboard displaying:
Active projects.
Recent development activity.
Generated drafts.
Pending approvals.
Scheduled posts.
Recently published posts.
Failed tasks.
Model and integration health.
The interface shall minimize unnecessary navigation and cognitive overhead.
FR-012: Generation Controls
The system shall allow the founder to configure:
Post length.
Tone and enthusiasm.
Technical detail.
Audience.
Post type.
Number of draft candidates.
Relevant project context.
Additional generation instructions.
The system shall support simple presets to reduce configuration requirements.
FR-013: Privacy and Security
The system shall:
Store configuration and project data locally by default.
Use local inference unless an external model provider is explicitly configured.
Protect integration credentials.
Avoid logging secrets or sensitive content.
Provide configurable retention policies.
Allow deletion of drafts and generation history.
Restrict publishing actions to authorized users.
Clearly identify any information sent to external services.
FR-014: Accessibility and Disability Accommodation
The system shall be designed to accommodate users with disabilities, including executive-function and energy-limiting disabilities.
The system shall:
Support asynchronous workflows.
Avoid requiring daily interaction.
Preserve unfinished work.
Provide clear, low-complexity navigation.
Support keyboard accessibility.
Use understandable status indicators.
Allow flexible schedules.
Avoid punitive reminders or streak-based engagement.
Permit extended periods of inactivity without loss of data.
FR-015: Logging and Auditability
The system shall maintain an audit trail of:
Activity ingestion.
Draft generation.
Draft modification.
Approval and rejection.
Scheduling.
Publication attempts.
Publication results.
Configuration changes.
Logs shall support troubleshooting without unnecessarily retaining sensitive information.
4. Nonfunctional Requirements
NFR-001: Performance
The system shall provide a responsive interface while generation and background tasks execute asynchronously.
Generation latency shall be dependent on the configured local model and hardware.
NFR-002: Reliability
The system shall preserve drafts and task state across application restarts.
Failed background operations shall not result in data loss or duplicate publications.
NFR-003: Maintainability
The architecture shall separate:
API and user interface.
Generation orchestration.
LLM provider interface.
Project context management.
Background task processing.
Platform integrations.
Persistent storage.
NFR-004: Resource Efficiency
The system shall support deployment on hardware capable of running the selected Ollama model.
It shall avoid unnecessary concurrent inference jobs and permit configurable generation limits.
NFR-005: Data Portability
The system shall store project context, drafts, and configuration in documented, exportable formats where practical.
5. Proposed Technical Architecture
Backend
Python
FastAPI
Pydantic
SQLAlchemy
AI Inference
Ollama
Locally hosted SLM
Configurable system prompts
Retrieval of relevant project context and writing samples
Database
SQLite for initial deployment
Optional PostgreSQL for multi-user or expanded deployments
Background Processing
APScheduler for initial scheduling
Persistent task records
Optional Redis and Celery for future scaling
Frontend
Existing Barkly Labs web stack
Responsive dashboard
Draft editor
Approval and scheduling interface
Integrations
GitHub API
Discord API
Modular connector interface for future platforms
6. Initial MVP Acceptance Criteria
The MVP shall be considered functional when:
The founder can configure and connect a local Ollama model.
The founder can create and save a writing-style profile.
The founder can register a Barkly Labs project.
The system can ingest or accept project activity.
The system can generate a community post from that activity.
The generated post reflects the configured founder voice.
The draft is saved and can be edited.
The founder can explicitly approve or reject it.
An approved post can be scheduled.
The system can publish to a configured Discord destination.
Publication status and history are visible.
The system can restart without losing drafts or schedules.
No post is published without satisfying its configured authorization policy.
The entire workflow can operate using local inference.
7. Future Enhancements
Automatic weekly development summaries.
Community activity and engagement analytics.
Multiple founder or project voice profiles.
Additional community platform integrations.
Automatic changelog-to-post conversion.
Optional local speech-to-text for voice notes.
AI-assisted responses to community questions with mandatory review.
Multi-user collaboration and role-based access control.
Semantic retrieval over project documentation.
Configurable autonomous generation of low-risk drafts.
8. Guiding Principle
Barkly Labs Developer Community Automation exists to reduce the burden of community management, not to create another obligation for its founder.
The system shall adapt to the founder's workflow, energy, and accessibility needs while preserving human agency, authenticity, privacy, and control over public communication.