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API Stability

Status: Current Last updated: 2026-04-30 23:00 EDT

The CLI is the only public surface

batchalign3 is a CLI-first tool. The compatibility surface that public consumers may depend on is:

  • the batchalign3 command-line interface (subcommands, options, output formats, exit codes)
  • the typed CHAT files written to disk by batchalign3 commands
  • the OpenAPI schema exported by batchalign3 openapi for the HTTP server, if you run a server

That is the entire compatibility surface. The Python runtime, the PyO3 extension module, the worker IPC payloads, and every internal module under batchalign.* are implementation details. They are not covered by any compatibility guarantee and may change without notice.

Python is internal

There is no public Python API. The Python code in this package exists to host worker-side ML inference (Stanza, Whisper backends, Cantonese ASR engines, etc.) on behalf of the Rust runtime. It is not a library you can import against.

This includes:

  • everything under batchalign.worker.*
  • everything under batchalign.inference.*
  • the batchalign.providers re-export module
  • the batchalign_core PyO3 extension module
  • every previously-documented Python facade (pipeline_api, compat, BatchalignPipeline, WhisperEngine, CHATFile, Document, ParsedChat, run_pipeline(), etc.)

If you have BA2-era Python integration code, port it to subprocess calls into batchalign3. The CLI’s flags and outputs are the long-term stable contract.

The intended long-term direction is to remove Python entirely as Rust gains coverage of the remaining ML pieces. The current Python surface is therefore a deliberately shrinking layer, not a shape to preserve.

Beta caveat

The project is in beta. The CLI surface, output formats, and configuration files are not yet frozen, breaking changes may land during the pre-1.0 stabilization period. Breaking changes will be documented but may land without a deprecation period while the project remains in beta. The public API surface will be formally frozen at the 1.0 release.

See also

This page last changed: 2026-06-19 (commit c82a6d03). The whole book last changed: 2026-09-16 (commit 34d249d8).