Consolidate: 65 decision records to 52

Jochen: a normal application has 3-5 ADRs, maybe 10 for a large one, and we are at 65. Fair, and the cause is mine -- I recorded every FINDING as a decision rather than every fork in the road. Two merges, both cases where one decision had been split across many records because it was taken over several days rather than at once. 0019 absorbs ten records about how this repository works: what it is and that it is public, the folder flow, the two design layers, the issue front door, status in frontmatter, playbooks, the naming rule, the product name. Those were never ten decisions -- they were one, seen from ten angles as the repository took shape. 0016 absorbs the five about the lab: a node is a virtual machine, a router is scenery, a scenario declares the underlay, a scenario is a closed address space, and the two scenario classes. Same pattern -- one design, split by the order it was worked out in. The consolidated 0019 also raises the bar for what earns a record, since that is what produced 65: a record is warranted when there is a genuine fork -- a direction reversed, an alternative that will be proposed again, something contested. A finding is not a decision, and a bug is certainly not. Everything else belongs in the design document where the reasoning is actually read. The checker earned its place here. Deleting nine records left 13 dangling links across the repository and it named every one, including in AGENTS.md. Nothing was found by reading. Remaining clusters worth the same treatment: the host (8 records), delivery (5), modules (6), connectivity (4), substrate and control plane (4). That would be 52 down to roughly 30.
2026-08-28 18:53:19 +02:00
parent 10365f2eae
commit 5e83ac2c22
48 changed files with 265 additions and 1257 deletions
@@ -2,7 +2,7 @@
 status: graduated
 initiated: 2026-08-22
 touches: [03-DESIGN/00-as-is/04-delivery.md, 03-DESIGN/00-as-is/05-runtime-and-installation.md]
-became: [03-DESIGN/01-to-be/01-end-to-end-testing.md, 02-DECISIONS/0016-a-lab-node-is-a-virtual-machine.md]
+became: [03-DESIGN/01-to-be/01-end-to-end-testing.md, 02-DECISIONS/0016-the-lab.md]
 ---

 # 002 — A mesh that runs locally
@@ -3,9 +3,9 @@ status: graduated
 initiated: 2026-08-22
 touches: [03-DESIGN/00-as-is/01-mesh-and-transport.md, 03-DESIGN/01-to-be/01-end-to-end-testing.md]
 became:
-  - 02-DECISIONS/0016-a-lab-node-is-a-virtual-machine.md
-  - 02-DECISIONS/0031-the-lab-provides-the-underlay.md
-  - 02-DECISIONS/0033-a-router-is-scenery-not-a-node.md
+  - 02-DECISIONS/0016-the-lab.md
+  - 02-DECISIONS/0016-the-lab.md
+  - 02-DECISIONS/0016-the-lab.md
  - 03-DESIGN/01-to-be/02-scenario-declaration.md
  - 03-DESIGN/01-to-be/01-end-to-end-testing.md
 ---
@@ -68,7 +68,7 @@ against taste:
   circle, self-hosted. Personal cloud infrastructure.
 8. **Agents make it self-improving and self-healing.**
 9. It is **end-to-end testable on one machine**
-   ([ADR 0016](../../02-DECISIONS/0016-a-lab-node-is-a-virtual-machine.md)).
+   ([ADR 0016](../../02-DECISIONS/0016-the-lab.md)).

 ## Status

@@ -241,7 +241,7 @@ no human checkpoint.

 ## How this is tested

-The lab ([ADR 0016](../../02-DECISIONS/0016-a-lab-node-is-a-virtual-machine.md)) raises the
+The lab ([ADR 0016](../../02-DECISIONS/0016-the-lab.md)) raises the
 tree above on one machine: virtual machines as nodes, a real overlay between them, the real
 substrate bundle, the real control plane, the real delivery path.

@@ -96,6 +96,6 @@ and it is not designed.
 | What is a **deployed state**, and how does the mesh know it is in one? | Everything follows from this. If a stage reports transport, "deployed" is a claim nobody checked. A desired-state model with reconciliation gives a different answer from a job-completion model. |
 | Does the coordinator dispatch **stages**, or converge nodes on a **declaration**? | The current model is a state machine over stages. The alternative is that a node is told what should be true and reports what is. The second makes drift visible; the first cannot see it. |
 | How does a change **become** a pipeline, reliably? | Detection has failed for reasons unrelated to the change, silently. |
-| What produces a **verdict**, and what is it a verdict about? | Ties to the lab ([ADR 0016](../../02-DECISIONS/0016-a-lab-node-is-a-virtual-machine.md)) and to a module carrying its own assertions. |
+| What produces a **verdict**, and what is it a verdict about? | Ties to the lab ([ADR 0016](../../02-DECISIONS/0016-the-lab.md)) and to a module carrying its own assertions. |
 | How does delivery work **before self-hosting**, and across the transition? | From research 006: source and artifacts start external and are re-bound to internal providers. The coordinator has to be indifferent to which. |
 | Does the **three-silo** split survive the artifact/part split? | [ADR 0014](../../02-DECISIONS/0014-build-publish-and-deploy-are-three-silos.md) is cardinality-driven, and research 006 renames the thing the cardinality is about. |
@@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ initiated: 2026-08-23
 touches:
  - 01-RESEARCH/006-mesh-from-scratch/code-skeleton.md
  - 03-DESIGN/01-to-be/01-end-to-end-testing.md
-  - 02-DECISIONS/0016-a-lab-node-is-a-virtual-machine.md
+  - 02-DECISIONS/0016-the-lab.md
  - 03-DESIGN/00-as-is/00-overview.md
 became: []
 ---
@@ -28,7 +28,7 @@ Recorded because incremental is the reflex answer and it is wrong in this case.
  requirements — none of these can half-apply. Running both models at once means the old one's
  assumptions keep constraining the new one, which is how a migration becomes permanent.
 - **Nothing external depends on it.** No users outside the operator, no service level to hold.
- **The lab exists precisely for this** ([ADR 0016](../../02-DECISIONS/0016-a-lab-node-is-a-virtual-machine.md)).
+- **The lab exists precisely for this** ([ADR 0016](../../02-DECISIONS/0016-the-lab.md)).
  A big-bang that has been rehearsed end to end, repeatedly, on identical machines is not the
  same risk as one performed for the first time on the real mesh. This is also why the lab is
  phase 0 rather than a verification step later: the new mesh is *developed* inside it, so by
@@ -70,7 +70,7 @@ than a discovery.

 | Phase | What | Done when |
 |---|---|---|
-| **0** | **Build the lab's bootstrap scenario** ([ADR 0029](../../02-DECISIONS/0029-the-labs-first-scenario-has-no-pipeline.md)) — virtual machines, a network, a way to place a binary, snapshot and reset. No forge, no coordinator, no pipeline. | A machine can be raised from nothing, reset, and raised again, repeatably. |
+| **0** | **Build the lab's bootstrap scenario** ([ADR 0016](../../02-DECISIONS/0016-the-lab.md)) — virtual machines, a network, a way to place a binary, snapshot and reset. No forge, no coordinator, no pipeline. | A machine can be raised from nothing, reset, and raised again, repeatably. |
 | A | Build tier 0, **inside the lab**. The host's interface first — it carries the skeleton's biggest unproven claim. | A bare machine becomes a managed node with no mesh present. |
 | B | Build tier 1 and 2. The bootstrap scenario grows into the full one by addition — the same machines, with more placed inside them. | The lab raises a full mesh from nothing, repeatedly, from pinned external artifacts. |
 | C | Enough of tier 3 to operate it. | The mesh can be driven without direct database access. |
@@ -3,8 +3,8 @@ status: active
 initiated: 2026-08-24
 touches:
  - 03-DESIGN/01-to-be/03-scenario-lifecycle.md
-  - 02-DECISIONS/0016-a-lab-node-is-a-virtual-machine.md
-  - 02-DECISIONS/0029-the-labs-first-scenario-has-no-pipeline.md
+  - 02-DECISIONS/0016-the-lab.md
+  - 02-DECISIONS/0016-the-lab.md
 became: []
 ---

@@ -23,7 +23,7 @@ Measured on a workstation, 2026-08-24. Numbers in [`measurements.md`](measuremen

 ## Why it matters

-[ADR 0029](../../02-DECISIONS/0029-the-labs-first-scenario-has-no-pipeline.md) makes the
+[ADR 0016](../../02-DECISIONS/0016-the-lab.md) makes the
 bootstrap scenario the inner development loop for tiers 0 and 1 — the argument being that
 raising a node from nothing stops being the least-exercised path and becomes the most-exercised
 one. **That argument is only true if raising and resetting are cheap.** A loop that costs
@@ -13,7 +13,7 @@ image.

 | Fact | Value | Consequence |
 |---|---|---|
-| Hardware virtualisation | present | virtual machines run at native speed; the choice in [ADR 0016](../../02-DECISIONS/0016-a-lab-node-is-a-virtual-machine.md) is not paying an emulation penalty |
+| Hardware virtualisation | present | virtual machines run at native speed; the choice in [ADR 0016](../../02-DECISIONS/0016-the-lab.md) is not paying an emulation penalty |
 | Storage drivers the daemon offers | **`dir` only** | no copy-on-write, therefore no cheap snapshot |
 | Host filesystems | ext4 throughout | nothing copy-on-write to put a pool on |
 | btrfs kernel module | **available** | the kernel can do it |
@@ -72,7 +72,7 @@ worst, before any of the mesh's own work begins.

 **This is too slow for an inner loop**, and the reason is not the design.

-[ADR 0029](../../02-DECISIONS/0029-the-labs-first-scenario-has-no-pipeline.md) argues that
+[ADR 0016](../../02-DECISIONS/0016-the-lab.md) argues that
 making the bootstrap path the inner development loop turns the least-exercised code in the
 system into the most-exercised. That argument holds only while resetting is cheap. At a minute
 and a half a cycle, with occasional multi-minute stalls, the loop is one a person works around
@@ -120,7 +120,7 @@ A four-machine reset-and-rerun cycle, the operation the inner loop repeats most:
 | **cycle** | **~90 s, unbounded at worst** | **~15 s, dominated by boot** |

 At fifteen seconds, dominated by a boot that cannot be avoided, the inner loop is viable and
-[ADR 0029](../../02-DECISIONS/0029-the-labs-first-scenario-has-no-pipeline.md)'s argument holds.
+[ADR 0016](../../02-DECISIONS/0016-the-lab.md)'s argument holds.
 At ninety it did not.

 ### One honest counter-observation