Updates and your settings

What an update replaces, what it keeps, and where your previous settings go.

TESSERACT updates itself by replacing its own program files wholesale. Its configuration now follows the same rule: when a release ships a new version of a config file, that file replaces yours, and the copy you had is kept.

This is deliberate, and the alternative is worse. Merging a release’s new settings into your file can only ever add — so when the shape of a file changes, both the old and the new spelling end up in it, and the app has no way to tell which one you meant. That failure is silent until it isn’t.

What actually happens

Only files a release genuinely changed are touched. If an update ships the same settings you already have, nothing is replaced, nothing is backed up, and you are not told anything — which is most updates.

When a file is replaced:

1. Your copy is saved to a config-backup folder inside your TESSERACT home directory, beside config.
2. The new version becomes your file.
3. The app tells you the next time you open it, twice over: a message when it connects, and a note in the Workspace that names the files, says where your old copies went, and stays there until you dismiss it. Putting settings back takes longer than a message stays on screen, so the note is the one that matters.

The backup folder holds only the most recent previous copy. The next update that changes those files overwrites what is in it. If there is something in there you want to keep permanently, move it somewhere else.

What is kept

Five things are not settings, and they survive:

Kept	What it is
The assistant’s name	what you called it
Your name	what it calls you
Its gender	how it refers to itself
Its birth date	what the age it reports counts from
The word you wake it with	the first half of the wake phrase

An update has no opinion about any of these. Setup asked you for each one and the shipped file carries a placeholder, so replacing them would rename your assistant, reset its age to day one, and leave you saying a wake phrase nothing responds to. They are read before the file is written and put back after.

What you may need to set again

Everything else in those files is replaced, including choices you made in Settings. After an update that says it replaced your configuration, check:

• Models — which model serves each role, and the order of your fallback chains.
• Voice — which voice speaks, and whether speech runs locally or in the cloud.
• Permissions — anything you moved from ASK to AUTO. These reset toward asking more often rather than less, which is the safe direction to be wrong in.
• Schedule — how often background jobs run, if you changed it.
• Which tools it sees — if you trimmed the working set to make turns cheaper, that trim is replaced by the release’s list. Conscience shows you the list and lets you set it again.

All of it is a few clicks in Settings, and the backup folder has your previous values if you would rather copy them across by hand. The files are plain YAML. The Workspace note stays up while you work through the list, so dismiss it once you are done rather than when you first read it.

One thing repairs itself: the speech model chosen for your machine is worked out again on the next launch, so a laptop that was given a smaller model keeps it without you doing anything.

Where to look

Your TESSERACT home directory holds both:

home/
├── config/          your settings, live
└── config-backup/   what you had before the last update that changed them

The backup folder contains a README.md explaining which files were replaced and when — written at the moment it happened, so it describes your install rather than the general case.

If you would rather not be surprised

Nothing stops you keeping your own copy. The config folder is plain files: copy it somewhere before you update, and you have a permanent record rather than a rolling one. If you version your home directory in git — which is a reasonable thing to do with it — you already have this.