diff --git a/CONTRIBUTING.md b/CONTRIBUTING.md
index 9cff2b16..4cbb3514 100644
--- a/CONTRIBUTING.md
+++ b/CONTRIBUTING.md
@@ -70,6 +70,11 @@ on merge.
 CI must pass before merge — typecheck, tests, and build all run on
 every PR (see `.github/workflows/ci.yml`).
 
+What happens to the PR after that — what the single `verify` check
+covers, how findings are sorted, and the two rules that catch people out
+(one commit per PR, and a push dismissing an approval) — is
+[`docs/pr-review-process.md`](./docs/pr-review-process.md).
+
 ## Tests
 
 New logic ships with a `*.test.ts` next to the file it tests. Tests
diff --git a/README.md b/README.md
index 3866a71a..0c5c403d 100644
--- a/README.md
+++ b/README.md
@@ -19,9 +19,13 @@ back to the PDF's embedded link annotations as recovered signal, so a
 candidate can still see what survived.
 
 New contributors: see [`docs/architecture.md`](./docs/architecture.md) for a
-one-page map of the pipeline and which folder each piece lives in, and
+one-page map of the pipeline and which folder each piece lives in,
 [`CONTRIBUTING.md`](./CONTRIBUTING.md) for setup, branch + commit conventions,
-and the PR checklist.
+and the PR checklist, and
+[`docs/pr-review-process.md`](./docs/pr-review-process.md) for what happens to a
+PR after you open it. [`docs/ai-usage.md`](./docs/ai-usage.md) separates the
+three places AI appears here — in the product, in how the code gets written, and
+in the repo's automation.
 
 ## Quick start
 
@@ -88,6 +92,9 @@ Chromium rides the Vulkan backend — if `chrome://gpu` shows `Vulkan: Disabled`
 Enabled → relaunch. (The hosted site is HTTPS, so real users only hit the
 adapter question, never the secure-context one.)
 
+Which surfaces use a model, which models are offered, and what a model download
+puts on the network: [`docs/ai-usage.md`](./docs/ai-usage.md).
+
 ## Debugging the parser
 
 ```bash
diff --git a/docs/ai-usage.md b/docs/ai-usage.md
new file mode 100644
index 00000000..af63c95a
--- /dev/null
+++ b/docs/ai-usage.md
@@ -0,0 +1,114 @@
+# How this project uses AI
+
+AI shows up in offlinecv in three places that have nothing to do with each
+other, and conflating them is how people end up with the wrong idea about
+where their résumé goes. They are: **in the product**, **in how the code gets
+written**, and **in the repo's own automation**.
+
+## 1. In the product — on-device, opt-in
+
+The parser itself is not AI. It is a heuristic cascade over pdf.js output
+([Architecture at a glance](./architecture.md#the-parse-cascade)), and it runs
+with no model at all.
+
+On top of that sit the optional surfaces that do use a local language model.
+Each is opt-in, and naming them is more useful than counting them, because the
+list grows: flagging where the heuristic parse and the model disagree,
+critiquing résumé quality, rewriting a bullet or a section, recovering a résumé
+the heuristic parser mangled, matching a pasted job description semantically,
+and inferring a posting's sector during a job search. All of them run through
+[WebLLM](https://github.com/mlc-ai/web-llm) on **WebGPU**, inside the tab. If
+the browser has no WebGPU, the surfaces detect that and say so rather than
+falling back to a server.
+
+One control in this lane deliberately points the other way, and it is the one
+worth knowing about: the rewrite panel offers to hand you its prompt to run in
+a model you already use elsewhere
+([`export-prompt.ts`](../src/lib/webllm/export-prompt.ts)). What it copies is
+instructions only — no name, no employer, no bullet, asserted against a full
+fixture résumé in `export-prompt.test.ts` — and a clipboard write reaches no
+network. Where you take it afterwards is your own choice rather than our
+default.
+
+| Model | Size | License |
+|---|---|---|
+| Qwen 2.5 (1.5B) — default | 1630 MB | Apache-2.0 |
+| Gemma 2 (2B) | 1895 MB | Restricted-Community |
+| Llama 3.2 (3B) | 2264 MB | Restricted-Community |
+
+Registry: [`src/lib/webllm/models.ts`](../src/lib/webllm/models.ts). The
+default is Apache-2.0 deliberately, so a fresh install boots without a licence
+prompt; the other two are gated behind a consent modal that shows the licence
+before anything downloads.
+
+**What crosses the network is the model, not your résumé.** Choosing a model
+downloads 1.6–2.3 GB of weights from `huggingface.co` and
+`raw.githubusercontent.com` — the one egress this lane has, and the reason the
+size is shown before you commit to it. The prompt, the résumé text, and the
+output stay in the tab. The full list of what does leave, across every lane, is
+[What leaves the tab](./architecture.md#what-leaves-the-tab).
+
+## 2. In how the code gets written — Claude Code, in the open
+
+This repo is developed with [Claude Code](https://claude.ai/code), and the
+configuration is committed rather than kept on someone's laptop: `CLAUDE.md`
+(the house rules the model reads before writing anything),
+[`.claude/settings.json`](../.claude/settings.json), 18 skill files under
+`.claude/skills/`, and the hooks under [`scripts/hooks/`](../scripts/hooks/)
+that fire on edit, on commit, and when a session ends. Read any of them — they
+are the actual instructions, not a sanitised copy.
+
+You will not find `Co-Authored-By: Claude` or a generated-with badge anywhere
+in the history. That is a **setting**, not a convention someone remembers to
+follow: `attribution` in `.claude/settings.json` blanks the trailer and the
+badge and drops the session URL, so the text is never emitted. The reasoning —
+including why prose telling a model to suppress its own attribution kept
+losing — is in
+[AI attribution](./CONTRIBUTING-PROCESS.md#ai-attribution--suppressed-by-configuration-not-by-prose).
+
+**You are not required to use it.** Contribute with whatever you like. The
+gates in [How a change gets reviewed and
+merged](./pr-review-process.md) do not know or care which editor produced the
+diff, and they are the same for everyone.
+
+## 3. In the repo's automation — less than you would guess
+
+The repo's own jobs are ordinary code. The comment moderator
+([`moderate-comments.yml`](../.github/workflows/moderate-comments.yml)) is an
+account-age threshold plus a list of regexes, and it only ever *hides* a
+comment, reversibly, and only from non-members — no model scores anything. The
+claim-releaser ([`stale-claims.yml`](../.github/workflows/stale-claims.yml)) is
+a date comparison. Neither is AI, and both are deliberately the kind of thing
+you can read in one sitting and predict exactly.
+
+## What AI does not get to decide
+
+A PR here may well get an AI review, and that review is **advisory**. Three
+things stop it from being anything more, and two of the three are enforced by
+configuration rather than by anyone remembering:
+
+- Branch protection requires **one approving review** from a human before a PR
+  can merge. A repo admin can bypass it, so read this one as enforced for
+  contributors and a convention for maintainers.
+- GitHub refuses an approval from a PR's own author, so a run that opens a PR
+  and reviews it cannot approve it — the review posts as a plain comment
+  carrying its real verdict.
+- **The merge is always a person's action.** Nothing in this repo auto-merges.
+
+So the useful way to read an AI review is as a very thorough first pass that
+has already checked the mechanical things — did the fixture leak contact data,
+is that a raw `<button>`, does the description match the diff — leaving a human
+reviewer the judgement calls. If you disagree with a finding, say so on the
+thread; a finding that does not reproduce gets dropped, and that is a normal
+outcome, not an argument you have to win.
+
+## If you contribute with AI
+
+Use it. Two things are yours regardless of what wrote the diff:
+
+1. **You own the change.** "The model wrote it" is not a review response. If
+   you cannot explain why a line is there, it is not ready.
+2. **Never paste a real résumé into anything committed.** Test with your own
+   locally as much as you like; the fixture PII policy is absolute and
+   `npm run check:fixtures` enforces part of it, but it cannot tell whether a
+   *name* is synthetic. That judgement stays yours.
diff --git a/docs/architecture.md b/docs/architecture.md
index 69a71da8..3c3f9070 100644
--- a/docs/architecture.md
+++ b/docs/architecture.md
@@ -118,6 +118,9 @@ README covers several of them in more detail:
    colour-token rules, so running it here rather than at push time is what
    saves you a surprise. `npm run verify` is the full pre-push gate and runs
    automatically on `git push`.
+4. Open the PR. [How a change gets reviewed and
+   merged](./pr-review-process.md) covers what the `verify` check runs, how
+   review findings are sorted, and why the branch has to arrive as one commit.
 
 `CLAUDE.md` carries the same pipeline in more depth, alongside the rules for
 writing code in this repo. Read it when this page runs out.
diff --git a/docs/pr-review-process.md b/docs/pr-review-process.md
new file mode 100644
index 00000000..fb7c530f
--- /dev/null
+++ b/docs/pr-review-process.md
@@ -0,0 +1,111 @@
+# How a change gets reviewed and merged
+
+The path a pull request takes from "I pushed a branch" to "it is in `main`",
+and the two rules along it that surprise people. Companion to
+[Architecture at a glance](./architecture.md) — that page tells you where your
+change goes, this one tells you what happens to it afterwards.
+
+## The path
+
+```
+claim an issue          comment on it; a maintainer adds `status:claimed`
+      ↓
+branch + commit         <your-initials>/<short-slug>, conventional prefix
+      ↓
+open a PR against main  title in conventional form, `Resolves #<n>` in the body
+      ↓
+CI runs `verify`        the one required check — see below
+      ↓
+review                  findings sorted Blocking / Secondary / Nit
+      ↓
+one approval            required; a later push dismisses it
+      ↓
+merge queue             squash, all-green, up to 5 built at once
+      ↓
+main
+```
+
+Claiming is the step people skip. An issue with the `status:claimed` label
+already has someone on it, and a claim with no linked PR and no activity for
+**7 days** is released automatically by
+[`stale-claims.yml`](../.github/workflows/stale-claims.yml). Full rules:
+[Claiming an issue](../CONTRIBUTING.md#claiming-an-issue).
+
+## What CI actually checks
+
+Branch protection on `main` requires exactly **one** status check, the `verify`
+job in [`ci.yml`](../.github/workflows/ci.yml). That single name hides the
+steps below, and knowing which one failed saves you a guess:
+
+| Step | Fails when |
+|---|---|
+| `npm run typecheck` | TypeScript does not compile |
+| `npm run lint` | ESLint — including the design-system and colour-token rules |
+| `npm run check:fixtures` | a committed résumé PDF carries real contact data |
+| `npm run check:baselines` | a known-failure exemption is charged to a closed issue |
+| `npm run check:core` | the publishable `@offlinecv/core` tarball is broken |
+| `npm run test:coverage` | a test fails |
+| `npm run build` | the production bundle does not build |
+| fallow static analysis | never — the audit's exit code is swallowed, and the report is uploaded to code scanning |
+
+`check:fixtures` runs **before** the test suite on purpose: the repo is public,
+so a leaked PDF is the one failure that cannot be undone by a follow-up commit.
+See the PII policy in
+[CONTRIBUTING-PROCESS.md](./CONTRIBUTING-PROCESS.md#test-fixtures--pii-policy-non-negotiable)
+before you add any fixture.
+
+Run the local gates first — `npm run verify:quick` while you iterate,
+`npm run verify` before you push (a `pre-push` hook runs it for you). They are
+not the sequence above: `verify` scopes the test run to the files you changed,
+where CI always runs the whole suite. Treat a green `verify` as a fast
+pre-flight, not a promise that CI will pass.
+
+## What a reviewer is looking for
+
+Findings are sorted into three buckets, and the label is a claim about the
+merge, not about tone:
+
+- **Blocking** — must change before merge: a bug that fires on normal use, real
+  contact data in a fixture, a hardcoded colour where a semantic token belongs,
+  a raw `<button>` where the design-system primitive belongs, or a description
+  that claims behaviour the code does not have.
+- **Secondary** — a real pattern worth fixing, not a merge blocker.
+- **Nit** — style and polish, explicitly non-blocking.
+
+Two properties of the review are worth knowing as an author. The **issue is the
+spec** — a PR that says `Resolves #N` while an acceptance criterion of #N is
+unimplemented is Blocking, because merging closes the issue and nothing reopens
+it. And the **PR description is read last**, as a claim to check against the
+diff rather than a guide to what to look at, so a description that overstates
+what changed is itself a finding.
+
+## The two rules that surprise people
+
+**One commit per PR.** `main` merges through a merge queue, and the queue's
+enqueue API carries no commit-message fields — so GitHub *derives* the squash
+message from the repo's settings, which concatenate every commit on the branch
+as bullets. A three-commit PR lands `wip` and `fix lint` in `main`'s history
+permanently. Collapse the branch before it reaches the queue; the full
+derivation is in
+[Squash messages](./CONTRIBUTING-PROCESS.md#squash-messages-one-commit-per-pr).
+
+**A push dismisses the approval.** `main` has dismiss-stale-reviews-on-push
+enabled, so pushing after someone approves sends the PR back to needing one.
+Address every comment in one pass and push once, then reply on the threads —
+not a push per comment.
+
+## How long it takes
+
+Of the **last 100 merged PRs** (snapshot 2026-08-28): median time open **4.7
+hours**, **86%** merged within a day, median **8** files changed, and **73**
+carried at least one review. Re-derive it yourself rather than trusting the
+snapshot:
+
+```bash
+gh pr list --repo offlinecv/OfflineCV --state merged --limit 100 \
+  --json number,createdAt,mergedAt,changedFiles,reviews
+```
+
+Nobody is watching the queue for you, though. If a PR has been sitting, say so
+on the issue or in chat — silence from a reviewer who is mid-review and silence
+from one who has not opened it look identical from the author's side.