# Getting Started

Welcome! Working with Weaviate, many of us in the team and the community are exposed to a suite of interesting technologies. They include not only vector databases, but also Docker, Kubernetes, GraphQL, REST and clients in various languages.

This means that is a wide set of opportunities for you to learn about and contribute to! If you are not sure where, we suggest finding something that overlaps with your interests

## How can I contribute?

These are just some of the ways that you could apply your skills to the project:

- [Suggesting Enhancements](getting-started-suggesting-enhancements.md)
- [Reporting Bugs](getting-started-reporting-bugs.md)

## Where can I contribute to?

There are four major GitHub repositories of Weaviate, any of which you can contribute to. This includes:

- [Weaviate Database](https://github.com/weaviate/weaviate) - Weaviate's "core" codebase
- [Weaviate Docs](https://github.com/weaviate/docs) - official Weaviate documentation
- [Weaviate Examples](https://github.com/weaviate/weaviate-examples) - apps built using Weaviate
- [Awesome Weaviate](https://github.com/weaviate/awesome-weaviate) - list of examples and tutorials on how to use Weaviate

It is important that any contributions such as suggestions or bug reports be made to the correct repository, as they will be otherwise very difficult to understand or integrate.

### Work on existing issues

You can also contribute by working on existing issues. Check the issues pages in Weaviate's GitHub repositories like the [Weaviate Database repository](https://github.com/weaviate/weaviate/issues). Consider starting with issues tagged '[good first issues](https://github.com/weaviate/weaviate/labels/good-first-issue)'.

## Related pages

- [Agents](./agents-index.md)
- [AI-assisted Weaviate code generation](./ai-assisted-vibe-coding-index.md)
- [APIs](./apis-index.md)
- [Authorization and authentication](./authorization-and-authentication-index.md)
- [Benchmarks](./benchmarks-index.md)
- [Best practices](./best-practices-index.md)
- [Client libraries](./clients-index.md)
- [Client Libraries / SDKs](./client-libraries-index.md)
- [Cloud](./cloud-index.md)
- [Cloud account management](./cloud-account-management-index.md)

# Agent Instructions

This portal answers questions programmatically. To receive a synthesized,
source-cited answer instead of crawling page by page, append the `?ask=`
query parameter to any page URL on this site:

    /guides/quickstart?ask=how+do+I+authenticate

Optional parameters:

- `&goal=<what-you-are-trying-to-do>` steers the answer toward your
  objective (e.g. `&goal=write+a+python+client`).
- `&version=<label>` scopes the answer to a mounted version when the
  portal publishes more than one.

The response is `text/markdown`: the answer followed by a `# Sources` list
of the portal pages it was grounded in. Status codes are the contract:

- `200` — the answer; `402` — the portal owner’s plan or answer credits are
  exhausted (surface this to your operator; do NOT retry); `429` — you are
  rate-limited; back off for the `Retry-After` seconds; `503` — the answer
  lane is temporarily unavailable; fall back to crawling the `.md` pages.

For the full corpus map read `llms.txt` at the site root; for the tool
surface (search + page fetch as MCP tools) see `/mcp`.