diff --git a/02-DECISIONS/0073-the-installer-carries-a-builder.md b/02-DECISIONS/0073-the-installer-carries-a-builder.md
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+---
+topic: the tiers
+status: accepted
+date: 2026-09-13
+deciders: jochen
+reconstructed: false
+extends: 0070-the-catalogue-owns-the-module-graph.md
+---
+
+# 73. The installer carries a builder, and the registry precedes the control plane
+
+## Context
+
+[ADR 0070](0070-the-catalogue-owns-the-module-graph.md) decided that genesis builds rather than
+carries, and [ADR 0071](0071-where-genesis-gets-its-source.md) settled where it clones from. Two
+questions were left open, and the design record names them as the one gap that stops a fresh mesh
+from being able to produce anything at all: **how the builder arrives**, and **what it publishes
+into**.
+
+They cannot be answered apart. A builder that arrives with nowhere to publish has produced a file
+on a disk, and a place to publish with nothing to produce is an empty shelf.
+
+Today the installer carries the control plane's image inside itself. That works, and it is why
+genesis needs no registry: nothing is ever pulled, because the one image that matters is already
+present. The cost is that the mesh which results holds an artifact it did not make, cannot rebuild,
+and knows nothing about — no version, no source, no edges. That is the same shape as the fault
+[issue 044](../04-ISSUES/044-the-runtime-every-module-builds-on-cannot-be-built-by-the-mesh/00-report.md)
+recorded for the shared runtime, and fixing it there while shipping it here on every new mesh would
+be a strange place to stop.
+
+## Decision
+
+**The installer carries a builder, and nothing else.** One artifact, not a growing set. It clones
+the source at a named commit, checks what it got ([ADR 0071](0071-where-genesis-gets-its-source.md)),
+and produces the control plane from the same repository and path that any later rebuild of it would
+use. What raises the mesh is therefore the same thing that will maintain it, and there is no second
+mechanism kept in step with the first.
+
+**The registry joins the substrate, and precedes the control plane.** Not because it became more
+fundamental, but because the answer to a stated question changed:
+
+| | is it substrate? | must it precede the control plane? |
+|---|---|---|
+| the store | yes | yes — there is nowhere else to put the control plane's state |
+| the broker | yes | yes — the control plane reaches a machine only over it |
+| the image registry | yes — it cannot grant itself a repository | **yes, now** — the control plane's image is produced here, and a produced image has to be put somewhere before anything can fetch it |
+
+[ADR 0033](0033-the-substrate-is-a-store-and-a-broker.md) answered that last cell *no*, and was
+right at the time, for the reason it gave: the first machine fetched the control plane from
+upstream, so nothing needed a registry until there was already a control plane to install one. That
+premise is what this decision removes. The registry's role never changed; what changed is whether
+anything needs it before the control plane exists.
+
+**The substrate bundle therefore carries three services and no control plane**, where it carried
+two services and a control plane. It does not grow: an image comes out as one goes in.
+
+## Consequences
+
+**Genesis gains a step and loses one.** The registry is raised with the substrate rather than
+installed as the first act of a temporary control plane, and a build step appears before the
+control plane is raised at all. The pivot described in
+[ADR 0067](0067-genesis-is-a-pivot.md) survives unchanged in shape — a temporary control plane is
+still what installs the permanent one — but what it installs is now something this mesh built.
+
+**A fresh mesh can produce from the moment it exists.** The builder is present before the control
+plane is, so the core modules, the catalogue and the builder's own module can be built in the
+ordinary way rather than waiting for somebody to carry them in. The paragraphs in
+[`17-raising-a-mesh`](../03-DESIGN/01-to-be/17-raising-a-mesh.md) that describe this were describing
+something that could not start; they can start now.
+
+**Genesis needs more of the outside world.** Carrying an image needed nothing but the installer.
+Building one needs the source, and whatever the build itself reaches for. This is a real cost and
+is not waved away: it makes genesis fail in more ways, all of them at a step that says what it was
+doing. It is accepted because the alternative is a mesh that cannot rebuild its own control plane,
+which fails in exactly one way, silently, later, and for ever.
+
+**A pre-built bundle remains possible and is not this.** Nothing here forbids delivering artifacts
+rather than building them; it fixes where they may come from. A bundle of pre-built core modules is
+an **export of a mesh that built them**, carrying what the catalogue knows about each alongside the
+artifact itself — so that loading one leaves the graph in the state building would have left it. A
+bundle that carries images without that is the thing this decision rejects, whoever ships it.
+
+## What this does not decide
+
+**Whether the builder's own module is carried or built.** It builds everything else; what installs
+*it* as an ordinary module afterwards, so that it too can be upgraded, is the same closed-list
+question [`12-a-module-repository`](../03-DESIGN/01-to-be/12-a-module-repository.md) already holds,
+and is unchanged by this.
+
+**How a machine authenticates to a registry that asks it to.** Genesis raises its own and reaches it
+over the loopback, so this remains a joining problem
+([issue 042](../04-ISSUES/042-nothing-gives-a-node-an-account-for-a-registry/00-report.md)).
diff --git a/02-DECISIONS/README.md b/02-DECISIONS/README.md
index 758393a..b9b864a 100644
--- a/02-DECISIONS/README.md
+++ b/02-DECISIONS/README.md
@@ -105,6 +105,7 @@ python3 00-META/checks/index.py            fail if stale
 - **0070** — [The catalogue owns the module graph, and genesis builds rather than carries](0070-the-catalogue-owns-the-module-graph.md)
 - **0071** — [Genesis clones from a mesh, and checks what it got](0071-where-genesis-gets-its-source.md)
 - **0072** — [Two graphs, and a build chain that orders itself](0072-two-graphs-and-the-build-chain.md)
+- **0073** — [The installer carries a builder, and the registry precedes the control plane](0073-the-installer-carries-a-builder.md)
 
 ### What runs on them, and how it gets there