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Order the records the way the system is learned

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Jochen asked whether the order made sense. It did not -- it followed when
things happened to be decided, which after consolidation is fictional anyway
since record 5 alone folds decisions taken across a week.

Concretely wrong before: the domain statement sat at 8, after five engineering
rules; the constitution was scattered across 5, 12 and 17; the tiers landed at
15, 16, 21 and 22 with process records in between.

Now it walks: what the mesh is (1-3), its tiers from the bottom up (4-8), what
runs on them and how it gets there (9-10), how it is built (11-16), how it is
checked (17-18), how we work (19-23).

Two things made this safe rather than free. It is a permutation, not a
compaction, so the renames go through temporary names -- otherwise two files
want one slot and one is lost. And the reference rewrite is a single
simultaneous pass, because almost every number moved into a slot another number
was vacating; replacing one at a time would have cascaded and pointed things at
the wrong record while still resolving.

Verified: 284 [ADR NNNN](path) links across the repository, all with matching
text and target.

The ordering principle is now stated in 19 rather than left implicit -- the
repository already said "the numbering is the flow" about its folders, and
there was no reason for the records to be the exception.
This commit is contained in:
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---
status: accepted
date: 2026-08-26
deciders: jochen
reconstructed: false
---
# 22. The constitution absorbs what is already enforced
## Context
[ADR 0021](0021-hq-is-the-source-of-the-constitution.md) makes this repository the source
and the knowledge base a derived copy, and playbook
[05](../00-META/process/05-constitution-sync.md) publishes the copy whenever a rule changes.
Three rules were accepted on 2026-08-25 and the sync came due. Reading the target before
overwriting it — as [§2](../00-META/how-we-build.md) requires — found the two documents had
diverged in a way nobody had recorded, and that a literal republish would have **deleted rules
the mesh currently enforces**.
| | source (`how-we-build.md`) | enforced page |
|---|---|---|
| §4 | naming and boundaries | **code quality** — structure, layering, types, restraint |
| §5 | four evidence rules | one runtime-evidence rule |
| §6 | review by a non-proposer | a design meeting with **two node operators** |
The enforced page was last written 2026-07-10, is agent-authored, and its code-quality section
appears in no decision record anywhere. It has been checked against for six weeks regardless.
Two facts made this urgent rather than tidy:
**Removal is not the safe option.** The orchestrator reads *"when absent, no constitution is
injected (backward-compatible)"* — so deleting the page would not fail, it would silently
inject nothing, and every design meeting would run unchecked with no error anywhere. Three
unenforced rules would become all of them.
**The stricter review bar has never been met.** The enforced page requires two node operators,
neither the proposer. There is one operator. Every amendment ever made violated it.
## Considered options
1. **Republish wholesale.** What the playbook literally says. Rejected — it deletes the
code-quality rules, which exist nowhere else.
2. **Merge surgically** — update §2, §3, §5 in the copy and leave §4 alone. Nothing is lost and
it is quick, but the source becomes authoritative for some sections and the copy for others,
which is the drift being fixed.
3. **Absorb, then republish.** Chosen.
## Decision
**What the mesh enforces and cannot cite is written down here first, then republished.**
The code-quality rules become §8 rather than §4, because appending renumbers nothing and every
existing citation stays valid.
**They are recorded as inherited, and marked as such.** Every other rule in the document states
the incident or measurement that earned it. These state nothing, because nothing was ever
written down. Importing them silently would have made the document claim a provenance it does
not have, and this repository's whole argument is that the reasoning is the expensive half.
**The review bar is resolved in favour of what is achievable.** A rule requiring two operators
where there is one is not a high standard, it is a rule everything silently violates — the same
shape as a firewall key declared in five manifests and read by no code
([04-ISSUES/003](../04-ISSUES/003-firewall-scope-is-read-by-no-code/00-report.md)). Review means
a person who is not the proposer, which is both achievable and what has been practised.
## Consequences
- **The copy can now be a faithful projection**, which is what makes "the source is the source"
true rather than aspirational.
- **§8 has no reasoning behind it and says so.** Anyone may propose replacing an inherited rule
with an earned one; until then the marking is the honest state. It is also a standing
invitation to delete any of them that turn out to serve nothing.
- **Six weeks of drift went unnoticed** because nothing compares the two. The sync is manual and
runs only when someone remembers a rule changed. **Nothing detects divergence**, and this
record does not fix that — it is worth an issue.
- **The operator's instinct to remove the copy was right about the direction and wrong about the
method.** The end state where the mesh reads this repository directly — rendered and operable
through the board — removes the second copy rather than blanking it. That is not designed and
is not decided here.
- **Section numbering is now append-only in practice.** §8 sits after the overrides section
purely because renumbering would break citations, which is a cost of the copy existing at all.
## Sync
Run 2026-08-26, and the read-back earned its place in the playbook.
**The first publish reported success and changed nothing.** It created a new revision and
updated the title, and the body did not apply — a malformed argument was dropped silently. Had
the sync been marked done on the strength of the tool saying *"updated; new revision created"*,
three accepted rules would have gone unenforced while every record said otherwise, and nothing
would ever have contradicted it.
That is §5 demonstrating itself during its own publication: a green result proves transport,
not effect. The republish was verified by reading the rule back out of the live page, not by
trusting the second success message either.
## References
- [ADR 0021](0021-hq-is-the-source-of-the-constitution.md) — source and copy.
- [ADR 0020](0020-the-mesh-is-governed-by-a-constitution.md) — why the copy is injected at all.
- [Playbook 05](../00-META/process/05-constitution-sync.md) — the sync this record interrupts.
- [ADR 0017](0017-a-test-defends-a-decision.md), [ADR 0018](0018-a-picture-is-read-from-what-runs.md),
[ADR 0012](0012-the-mesh-creates-no-symlinks.md) — the three rules whose sync surfaced this.