Jochen: a normal application has 3-5 ADRs, maybe 10 for a large one, and we are
at 65. Fair, and the cause is mine -- I recorded every FINDING as a decision
rather than every fork in the road.
Two merges, both cases where one decision had been split across many records
because it was taken over several days rather than at once.
0019 absorbs ten records about how this repository works: what it is and that
it is public, the folder flow, the two design layers, the issue front door,
status in frontmatter, playbooks, the naming rule, the product name. Those were
never ten decisions -- they were one, seen from ten angles as the repository
took shape.
0016 absorbs the five about the lab: a node is a virtual machine, a router is
scenery, a scenario declares the underlay, a scenario is a closed address
space, and the two scenario classes. Same pattern -- one design, split by the
order it was worked out in.
The consolidated 0019 also raises the bar for what earns a record, since that
is what produced 65: a record is warranted when there is a genuine fork -- a
direction reversed, an alternative that will be proposed again, something
contested. A finding is not a decision, and a bug is certainly not. Everything
else belongs in the design document where the reasoning is actually read.
The checker earned its place here. Deleting nine records left 13 dangling links
across the repository and it named every one, including in AGENTS.md. Nothing
was found by reading.
Remaining clusters worth the same treatment: the host (8 records), delivery
(5), modules (6), connectivity (4), substrate and control plane (4). That would
be 52 down to roughly 30.
The principle is obvious; the obligations it imposes are not, and those are what
was actually being decided.
The applier records what it did, including facts it never reads itself, purely
so something else can read them back. It records them AFTER the thing works, so
a half-finished run ends up with less metadata rather than optimistic metadata —
rejecting the simpler alternative of tagging at creation with a status field,
because a failed raise deliberately leaves wreckage standing and wreckage tagged
at creation claims things that never happened. And it binds anything that
reports on the mesh, not only the drawing.
§5 carries the rule unqualified now. The constitution sync is owed for this and
for 0034 and 0018, and has not been run.
Drawing a scenario forced a choice that looks cosmetic and is not. A diagram
built from the declaration and captioned "as raised" answers "is what is running
what I asked for?" with the request, which always agrees with itself.
So: a picture captioned as raised reads only the running system, and where the
hypervisor does not hold a fact the picture needs, the raise records it on the
resource. With the rule that makes the recording worth anything — a behavioural
tag is written after the behaviour works, never at creation, because a failed
raise leaves wreckage standing and a picture of wreckage must not badge what the
wreckage was supposed to be.
It earned itself on the first comparison: every VM showed no addresses, because
a container's interface carries the device's name and a VM names its own. The
two pictures disagreed, so a whole class of machine silently losing its
addresses was visible in seconds.
§5 of how-we-build gains the general form, marked proposed. The constitution
sync is deliberately NOT done — a rule the mesh enforces before a second person
agreed to it is what §6 exists to prevent.
jschoubben