HQ — the mesh's own documentation

What the mesh is, what it is becoming, and why. Implementation lives in the
code repositories; the reasoning lives here.

  00-GENESIS   mission, engineering context, effect, and the rules that hold
  01-RESEARCH  investigations, before they harden into design
  02-DESIGN    the authoritative specification
  adr          numbered decisions — what was chosen, and what was rejected
  DECISIONS.md the ledger: every decision, in the order it was taken

Written for a reader who is not its author and has no access to the mesh it
describes. Addresses use the documentation ranges of RFC 5737 and RFC 1918;
nodes are named by role.

Single initial commit by intent. The prior history came from a private
repository and carried operational detail — a routable address identified as a
VPN hub, real domain names, a hosting provider — which sanitising a tip commit
would not have removed from the log.

00-GENESIS/README.md

@@ -0,0 +1,28 @@
+# 00-GENESIS
+
+The **northern star**. What HAL is, the environment it runs in, and what changes when it
+works. Every research effort and design decision is checked against this folder.
+
+| File | Purpose |
+|------|---------|
+| [`mission.md`](mission.md) | Vision, mission, and the values that decide arguments |
+| [`context.md`](context.md) | The environment — conditions, not aspirations |
+| [`effect.md`](effect.md) | What is different when the work is done |
+| [`how-we-build.md`](how-we-build.md) | Rules that hold across the mesh, each one earned |
+
+## Rules
+
+- Markdown only.
+- **Stable by nature.** Changes here reflect a genuine shift in intent, not iteration.
+- Research and design must be traceable back to what is written here.
+
+## Note on `VISION.md`
+
+The repository root carries `VISION.md`, an architecture overview predating this folder.
+It is a useful description of *how* the mesh works and should be folded into
+[`02-DESIGN`](../02-DESIGN/), not here — GENESIS answers *why*.
+
+It has also drifted: it lists "Symlinks, not copies" as a key design principle, while the
+operating rules forbid creating symlinks at all after one caused production data loss.
+A founding document contradicting a hard rule is precisely the failure this folder exists
+to prevent.