diff --git a/03-DESIGN/01-to-be/00-work-breakdown.md b/03-DESIGN/01-to-be/00-work-breakdown.md
index e458d96..cf61b0b 100644
--- a/03-DESIGN/01-to-be/00-work-breakdown.md
+++ b/03-DESIGN/01-to-be/00-work-breakdown.md
@@ -149,6 +149,43 @@ first step, one service at a time, and the previous arrangement left standing un
 has been read back. None of that is slower than the alternative, because the alternative includes
 losing something.
 
+## How the two systems hand over
+
+*2026-08-31.* **The old system's brain is switched off; its services keep running.**
+
+Not a migration and not a period of dual control. The old control plane — provisioning, the
+coordinator, the pipeline, the things that *decide* and *write* — is stopped. Every workload it
+was managing goes on running exactly as it is, because nothing is managing it. Then the new mesh
+takes ownership of them one at a time.
+
+**Nothing is ever unassigned in the old system.** Unassigning is how it removes things, and
+removing is how data is lost. The old system is never asked to take anything away; it is asked to
+stop having opinions.
+
+| | |
+|---|---|
+| **stopped, and disabled** | provisioning, the coordinator, environment and configuration sync, the pipeline — anything that decides or writes a file |
+| **left alone entirely** | the units running the actual services: identity, mail, databases, the forge. They keep serving throughout |
+| **never used** | unassign, remove, delete — any operation whose job is to take something away |
+
+**Disabled, not merely stopped**, and this is the part that is easy to get wrong: those units are
+enabled, so stopping them lasts until the machine reboots. A reboot mid-conversion would bring the
+old control plane back and it would resume regenerating managed files underneath the new one —
+which is the one situation where two systems really would be fighting over the same machine.
+
+**A service left running with nothing managing it is the safe state.** It has its data, its
+configuration is already on disk, and nothing is going to change either. That is the whole trick:
+the risk in a conversion is in the *managing*, not in the *running*.
+
+**A brief interruption is acceptable. Losing data is not.** Where those two trade against each
+other, the interruption wins every time — a service can be restarted, and there is no operation
+that un-deletes a mail spool.
+
+**The new host cannot remove what it did not put there.** Orphans are per-origin, so it only ever
+removes resources it recorded itself. Services it has never been told about are not orphans to
+it — they are simply not its business, which is what makes taking ownership one module at a time
+safe.
+
 ## Phase 2 — the first real module
 
 | # | task | done when |