Base layer: the mesh as it is, under the mesh as it should be

HQ held only the to-be. Every reader had to already know the system the
decisions were about, and an as-is claim had nowhere to live except inside
an intention.

Adds 02-DESIGN/00-as-is — eleven documents written from the implementation
and the operational record, not from intent, including the parts nobody
would choose again. The two existing designs move under 01-to-be. Layers
are declared in frontmatter and never mix: a design that ships does not
move, its as-is counterpart is written, and both stand.

Back-fills adr/0001-0014 for decisions taken in implementation and never
recorded — the broker, the module abstraction, the mesh database, managed
files, provisioning, migrations, the workspace removal, failing loudly,
the constitution, application placement, linking, the employee model, the
artifact, the three silos. Each marked reconstructed, dated from the
history, and citing the evidence it was recovered from. The two existing
records renumber to 0015 and 0016 so the ledger runs oldest first;
0017 extends 0015 to modules outside the core, principle only — the
domain list is deliberately not invented here.

how-we-build.md becomes the source of the mesh constitution, with a sync
playbook, so the enforced copy stops being the only one that is true.

Process becomes explicit: five playbooks, eight thin skills that defer to
them, a repository map, and AGENTS.md with CLAUDE.md as its include.

The five Observations become 04-ISSUES 001-005 where they can be owned and
closed. 006 is new and uncomfortable: HQ is not indexed into the knowledge
base. That claim is what decision 27 rests on, it was never checked, and
the README now says so instead of repeating it.

Also corrects the ADR index into something generated, the "02-DESIGN is
empty" claim, the VISION.md pointer that did not survive the repo split,
and a note asserting the symlink rule was contradicted — it was a
misreading; the rule forbids hand-made links, the installer links by design.

02-DESIGN/00-as-is/05-runtime-and-installation.md

@@ -0,0 +1,102 @@
+---
+layer: as-is
+status: implemented
+code: [hal]
+updated: 2026-08-23
+decisions:
+  - adr/0002-everything-is-a-module.md
+  - adr/0011-the-installer-owns-linking.md
+---
+
+# The node runtime, and how a node comes into being
+
+Every node runs the same runtime. What differs is its assignment.
+
+## Two modes, coexisting
+
+The runtime runs in two modes at once on any node that needs both.
+
+**Daemon** mode is a headless consumer: it connects to the broker, consumes the node's request
+queue, routes each request to a local capability, and emits the node's lifecycle events. This
+is what makes a node a participant — it is reachable whether or not anyone is logged in.
+
+**Interactive** mode exposes the node's capabilities to a session on that machine over a local
+protocol. Its capability surface is larger, because it includes stand-ins for every capability
+discovered on peers.
+
+The two are the same code with the same catalogue. A capability is written once and is
+available to both.
+
+## Anatomy naming, and what it obscures
+
+The runtime's components are named after brain anatomy: an entry point that bootstraps, a
+headless listener, an interactive surface, an installer daemon, and a provisioner daemon.
+
+This is the mesh's most-cited naming problem and it belongs in the as-is layer because it is
+what a reader will actually encounter. The names are evocative and describe nothing: the most
+suggestive word in the system names the node runtime, and the component whose manifest says
+"mesh messaging" is documented elsewhere as the interactive runtime. Anatomy makes attractive
+names and poor boundaries.
+
+[ADR 0015](../../adr/0015-mesh-brokers-nodes-host-agents-think.md) replaces this with names
+taken from what each part owns. Until then, this is the vocabulary in the code.
+
+## Starting a module
+
+For each assigned module the runtime, at startup:
+
+1. Reads the manifest, if there is one — a flag module has nothing to read.
+2. Skips a module's capabilities if a variable they require is unset. This is quiet by design
+   and hard to distinguish from a module that has no capabilities.
+3. Loads the capabilities the module carries.
+4. For a service module, ensures it is installed and running.
+
+Installation is idempotent and does the unglamorous work: ensure the runtime directory,
+reconcile the link from the catalogue's definition into it, generate the environment, run any
+outstanding local migrations, create data directories with the right ownership, then start the
+service under supervision.
+
+**The installer is the only thing that creates a link** ([ADR
+0011](../../adr/0011-the-installer-owns-linking.md)). It reconciles rather than assumes: a
+missing link is created, a stale one repointed, and a real file found where a link belongs is
+adopted into the node's override area and replaced. Nothing else — not a hook, not a fix, not a
+person debugging — creates one.
+
+## Supervision
+
+Services run under the host's init system via a templated unit, one instance per module. It is
+a thin layer: the unit starts and stops a container group.
+
+Whether the mesh keeps this, drops the per-module layer, containerises the daemons, or writes
+its own supervisor is **open** — costed in research effort 003 and deliberately undecided. It
+no longer gates anything.
+
+Two failures worth knowing about, both in the shape of "the change did not apply". A
+per-instance copy of the unit template shadows the template, so edits to the template do
+nothing. And a session-scoped one-shot job loses the environment it was given, because the
+import is one-time and not persisted.
+
+## How a node comes into being
+
+Three bootstrap scripts, and which one runs depends on the situation:
+
+- **First node.** Nothing exists yet, so the script stands up the database the rest of the
+  mesh reads from, publishes the catalogue, and starts the mesh. This resolves the
+  circularity of a mesh whose source of truth is itself a provisioned module.
+- **Joining.** The node registers, takes its assignment from the database, and syncs.
+- **Rescue.** A node that cannot reach the mesh is brought back far enough to.
+
+Bringing a node into being is therefore a **database operation with a script attached**, not a
+checkout. There is no per-node content in the repository to copy.
+
+Adoption of a pre-existing machine's configuration was the original path and is now a legacy
+one, explicitly out of scope for the lab
+([`01-to-be/01-end-to-end-testing.md`](../01-to-be/01-end-to-end-testing.md)).
+
+## Node identity
+
+Each node carries an identity text in its own record, which the daemon writes onto the node at
+startup so that a session on that machine knows which node it is on and how that node
+presents itself. It carries identity only; shared rules live separately.
+
+Like everything else derived onto a node, it is generated and not edited there.