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.
Building tier 0 forced the question "the one binary installed by hand" had been
carrying unexamined. A TypeScript host needs a runtime present before it runs,
so the thing installed by hand becomes two — and the second must be installed by
the means the host exists to replace.
So the host is a statically linked binary that requires nothing present, written
in Go. Rejected: a runtime installed first, which breaks the property the tier
rests on; and bundling the runtime into the executable, which carries ninety
megabytes to preserve a language choice and puts a young feature at the bottom
of the stack.
The argument that decided it is architectural rather than about taste. 0037
means the host never queries the mesh database and 0039 means it only receives
declarations, so the host shares NO code with any other tier — not a client, not
a schema, not the SDK. The language boundary falls exactly on a boundary that
already exists, and a second language usually costs duplicated logic where here
there is none to duplicate.
§8 gains a scope: it said "TypeScript throughout" when everything was a service
or a surface, and is now scoped to those with tier 0 named. Another sync owed.
Playbook 04 steps 2 and 4: repos.md records mesh-host as existing, the design
takes code: [mesh-host] and status: in-progress.
jschoubben