A record can assert a fact that goes stale while the decision it supports
stays right. Superseding for that buries a sound record under a second one
and makes every reader work out which is live. So a correction of fact is
now made in place, marked and dated, with the old wording quoted — bounded
by three conditions and checked by records.py, which fires on an unmarked,
undated or back-dated note. Judgements still supersede.
Applied to 0115: no conformance suite exists to recapture, and the full
genesis bed cannot run until the links exist. Designs 25 and 28 follow.
papa-hq has no ledger. Its root is AGENTS.md, CLAUDE.md, README.md, every
decision is a numbered record, and its graduation playbook has no path for
an unrecorded decision. hal-hq now matches.
The ledger's 41 entries classified as: 10 restating a record, 11 restating
design docs, 15 describing how this repository works with the reasoning
sitting in a README rather than anywhere citable, 3 small rules with no
home, 2 superseded stubs. Mostly a copy — and a hand-maintained index, the
exact pattern ADR 0022 had just rejected for the decision index on the
grounds it drifted after one addition. Keeping one copy of that while
removing another is not a position. It also collided by name with
02-DECISIONS/ in any directory listing.
Nothing was dropped. Records 0019-0025 give the repository decisions the
reasoning they never had: HQ is its own repository and is public, design
has two layers, work moves through playbooks, status lives in frontmatter,
issues have a front door, the numbering is the flow, HQ is the source of
the constitution. 0026 records the ledger's own removal.
The three orphan rules went to how-we-build, where a rule is enforced and
keeps the incident that earned it — the package rule was genuinely
unwritten anywhere. Two lab decisions stated only in the ledger went into
the lab design. "Deliberately not decided" went to the research effort and
design document each question actually belongs to.
The chronological view the ledger provided is now generated from record
frontmatter, which is what it was for.
The cost, stated in 0026 rather than glossed: a record is more work than a
table row, so the risk is a small decision going unrecorded because nobody
wanted to write a document. how-we-build takes rules cheaply, which is the
mitigation, not a solution.
papa-hq reads 01 research -> 03 decision -> 02 design. The order is a
scar, not a choice: 02-DESIGN existed from its initial commit, and when
adr/ was finally promoted on 2026-07-13 it took the next free number
rather than its place in the sequence. By then design was too settled to
renumber.
hal-hq was three commits old, so it is not. adr/ becomes 02-DECISIONS and
02-DESIGN becomes 03-DESIGN, and following the folder numbers now walks
the process in the order it happens: research produces a decision, the
decision authorises a design.
00-GENESIS becomes 00-META, matching papa's rename from the same
restructure.
Every path reference rewritten across documents, frontmatter, playbooks
and skills. All links resolve; all 58 frontmatter blocks parse and their
path fields still point at files that exist.
jschoubben