First hour with Donna
Orientation: what Donna is, the one architectural idea everything follows from, and where to go next. Four short reads plus the docs map.
What Donna is, structurally
Donna is a single SvelteKit application that acts as a backend-for-frontend (BFF) in front of
the vendored LQ.AI legal-AI backend. The browser talks only
to Donna's SvelteKit server; that server holds the lq-ai JWT in httpOnly cookies, attaches a bearer
token when proxying to the lq-ai api, and transparently refreshes on 401. There is no CORS, and the
JWT never reaches client JavaScript. Donna implements no legal-AI logic itself — retrieval, the
citation engine, anonymization, skills/playbooks, tabular review, and the autonomous runtime all live
in lq-ai, which is vendored as a pinned git submodule at vendor/lq-ai and brought up by Donna's own
docker-compose.yml.