Special Thanks
✨Anselm Eickhoff
For the gift of a name
A heartfelt thank you to @aeplay
for graciously transferring the caro crate name to this project. This act of generosity
gave Caro its identity — a memorable, friendly name that embodies our mission.
"Work sucks. Play works." — We couldn't agree more.
Anthropic & Claude Code
The Maintainer's Co-Pilot
Caro was built with the help of Claude Code, Anthropic's agentic coding tool. From architecture decisions to code reviews, debugging sessions to documentation — Claude Code has been an indispensable collaborator in bringing Caro to life. A testament to how AI can augment human creativity in open source development.
AI & Machine Learning
The brilliant minds and teams building the models and frameworks that power local AI inference.
llama.cpp
by Georgi Gerganov
The project that brought LLM inference to the masses. llama.cpp's pure C/C++ implementation enables Caro to run language models efficiently on any hardware. With 91k+ GitHub stars, it's the backbone of local AI inference.
Apple MLX
by Apple Machine Learning Research
The array framework that makes Apple Silicon sing. Built by Awni Hannun, Jagrit Digani, Angelos Katharopoulos, and Ronan Collobert — MLX powers Caro's blazing-fast inference on M-series Macs.
Qwen
by Alibaba Cloud Qwen Team
The magnificent Qwen2.5-Coder models that power Caro's shell command generation. With 100+ open weight models and 40M+ downloads, Qwen represents the best of open source AI. A massive shoutout to the entire Qwen team!
Hugging Face
The AI Community Platform
The hub that makes model distribution possible. Caro uses Hugging Face's infrastructure for model caching and downloads, bringing the best open models to your local machine.
Candle
by Hugging Face
A minimalist ML framework for Rust that provides Caro's cross-platform CPU inference backend. Fast, lightweight, and Rust-native.
Rust Ecosystem
The incredible Rust crates and their maintainers that form Caro's foundation. Without these libraries, there would be no Caro.
Tokio
Async Runtime
Created by Carl Lerche and maintained by Alice Ryhl — Tokio is the async foundation that powers Caro's concurrent operations. Alice's tireless work as the first paid Tokio contributor has been instrumental to the ecosystem.
Serde
by David Tolnay
The legendary serialization framework with 196M+ downloads. David Tolnay's work on serde, syn, quote, anyhow, and thiserror has shaped how the entire Rust ecosystem handles data and errors.
Clap
by Ed Page & rust-cli
The CLI argument parser that makes Caro's interface possible. With 28M+ downloads per month, clap's derive macros and comprehensive features are the gold standard for Rust CLIs.
Reqwest
by Sean McArthur
The ergonomic HTTP client for Rust. Sean's work on reqwest, hyper, and the entire networking stack powers Caro's remote backend connections.
Tracing
by Eliza Weisman
Structured diagnostics for Rust. Eliza's tracing ecosystem provides Caro with comprehensive logging and observability. A core tokio-rs team member whose work benefits the entire async Rust ecosystem.
Indicatif
by Armin Ronacher (mitsuhiko)
Progress bars and spinners that make Caro's output beautiful. Armin Ronacher — creator of Flask and core Sentry contributor — brings the same polish to the Rust console ecosystem.
Also Powered By
Web Technologies
The frameworks and tools that power caro.sh — this very website you're reading.
Astro
by Fred K. Schott & The Astro Team
The web framework for content-driven websites. Astro's zero-JS by default philosophy makes caro.sh fast and accessible. Thanks to Fred and the incredible open source community behind Astro — governance that puts contributors first.
Vercel Analytics
Privacy-friendly insights
Real-time, privacy-friendly traffic insights that help us understand how people use caro.sh without compromising visitor privacy.
canvas-confetti
Celebration effects
Because sometimes you need confetti! This lightweight library adds joy to our celebrations without bloating the bundle.
elevator.js
by Tim Holman
A "back to top" button that behaves like a real elevator — complete with muzak! Tim's delightfully weird creation adds personality to our scroll experience.
Inspiration
Portal's Caroline
The name "Caro" draws inspiration from Caroline, the AI assistant in Valve's Portal series. Like Caroline, Caro aims to be a helpful, loyal companion — but one that respects your autonomy and keeps you safe.
Kyaro (The Real One!)
Meet IRL Kyaro (Kyarorain Kadosh) — the real-life inspiration for Caro's loyal companion spirit. Follow her adventures on Instagram @kyaroblackheart 🐕🖤
The Unix Heritage
Caro stands on the shoulders of giants. We honor the GNU Project, the Free Software Foundation, and the FreeBSD community — pioneers who proved that software freedom and collaboration create better tools for everyone. Their vision of a world where users control their computing is woven into everything we build.
Open Source Community
Every contributor who has ever opened an issue, submitted a PR, answered a question, or shared knowledge freely. The open source ethos makes projects like Caro possible.
Open Source Licenses
Caro is licensed under AGPL-3.0. We depend on many open source projects with various licenses:
MIT License
tokio, clap, indicatif, dialoguer, colored, tracing, reqwest, hyper, anyhow, thiserror, elevator.js, canvas-confetti
MIT OR Apache-2.0
serde, serde_json, chrono, regex, once_cell, async-trait, futures
Apache-2.0
Qwen models, tokenizers, hf-hub
MIT
llama.cpp, MLX (Apple), Astro
For a complete list of dependencies and their licenses, run cargo tree
or check our Cargo.lock.
Thank You
To every developer who has contributed a line of code, filed a bug report, answered a question, or simply used and shared these incredible projects — thank you. Open source is a gift economy, and we're grateful to be part of it.
If we've missed anyone or made any errors, please open an issue and let us know!
— The Caro Team 🐕