What this actually is, and three things that were assumed

Four things settled by talking them through, all of which had been true in somebody's head and written nowhere. It is not a mesh in the peer-to-peer sense and will not become one. 0001 now says what it is instead: machines linked by a private network, one node holding knowledge of all of them, modules as the way anything is built and delivered, and agents hired onto nodes to do the work. The word describes what machines can reach, not how they are governed. "Master" overstates it the other way -- nothing needs that node to keep running, only to change. 0006 gains the option that would make it a real mesh, recorded as considered rather than rejected by silence: every node holding the whole inventory, a replication process, an elected master with promotion on failure. What settles it is not the complexity but that it still would not deliver the name, because application databases are not replicated -- so a genuine peer-to-peer mesh means becoming a replicated database system for every consumer's data too. That is a larger product than the thing it would support. Also in 0006: three central roles, not one. Losing the control plane costs change, losing the broker costs being told anything, and losing the hub costs nodes in different places reaching each other at all -- which is operation, not administration. Whether they are one node is not decided. And SSH access is identity's. It appeared three times as something that uses the overlay and never as something the mesh provides, which reads as settled when nothing decided it. Nobody else could: the mesh is the only thing that knows which humans and agents exist and which nodes they may reach. Node to node SSH stays out -- the host has no inbound control surface by decision, and nodes reaching each other that way is a second control path through the back door. 0007 gains the requirement underneath all of it. Reachability was recorded as a fact to track and never as a thing some node must have. The broker's node and the hub must be dialable by every node at a stable address, or nothing can join and a disconnected node cannot return. A mesh entirely behind NAT cannot be raised. That is a precondition and it belongs with the others. The link staying on the underlay is also argued now rather than asserted. At join time it is forced; afterwards it is a choice, and the reason is that a repair channel carried over the thing being repaired is not one. Moving it onto the overlay, with fallback, is recorded as open with what it would have to get right -- a WireGuard interface has no link state to test, and a silent fallback is this repository's recurring fault in a new place. 0010 says in one line what was the intention throughout: the module system is the CI/CD. Not a pipeline beside the mesh. Build, test, publish and deploy are one reconciliation seen at four points, which is why a thing that cannot be a module cannot be delivered.
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@@ -70,6 +70,37 @@ invariants were found violated simultaneously (see Consequences).
 **The mesh brokers capabilities. Nodes are places where work runs. Agents are personas
 that think and act.** Everything else supports one of those three.

+### What this is, plainly — and what "mesh" does not mean
+
+*Written 2026-08-29, from working through connectivity and asking whether the word still fits.*
+
+Four layers. Naming them honestly is worth more than the word on the tin:
+
+| | |
+|---|---|
+| **machines are linked by a private network** | and every machine reaches every other over it |
+| **one node holds knowledge of all of them** | the control plane, and only it |
+| **modules are how anything is built and delivered** | this *is* the CI/CD, not something beside it ([ADR 0010](0010-delivery.md)) |
+| **agents are hired onto nodes and do the work** | the layer the other three exist to carry |
+
+**This is not a mesh in the peer-to-peer sense and will not become one.** The word describes what
+machines can reach, not how they are governed:
+
+| | a mesh? |
+|---|---|
+| what a machine can reach | **yes** — genuinely any to any |
+| how the traffic travels | no — anything crossing sites transits the hub |
+| who decides | no. One node, declared |
+
+**And *master* overstates it in the other direction.** A master implies the others need it in
+order to function. They do not: every node holds what it was last told and runs from that copy
+*always* — not as a fallback, as the only mode it has. So the control plane being gone is every
+node in the ordinary disconnected situation at once, and **what is lost is change, not
+operation.**
+
+The accurate phrase is **one authority, no failover**, and both halves are deliberate
+([ADR 0006](0006-the-substrate-and-the-control-plane.md)).
+
 ### Nodes and agents are decoupled

 A node is a place where an agent can run — that is the entire relationship. There is no