ADR 0027 — the product is Novox Mesh, shortened to mesh internally. HAL was
never chosen: it arrived with the dotfiles repository this grew out of, it
is borrowed, and it is borrowed from the canonical untrustworthy machine
intelligence, which is an odd flag for infrastructure trusted with
credentials. Timing is the substance of the decision, not an aside — the
skeleton is not built, so renaming costs a search and replace now and a
migration later.
Nox is an identity of Novox, and specifically the agent of the MESH rather
than of a node. Nodes keep their own identities. Nox addresses them, and a
human mostly talks to Nox — which makes it the concrete form of the
mission's vision: state an intent, and the mesh works out which node holds
the thing. It holds no private channel. The gap this opens is recorded:
ADR 0012 binds every agent to a home node, and a mesh-scoped agent has
none, so the model needs extending.
ADR 0028 — HQ is company-scoped, novox/hq, with the mesh as its first
product. Checked rather than assumed: the company organisation already
holds live projects that the mesh builds and deploys, so they are tenants
rather than peers, and the mesh is the ground they stand on. There is also
company work outside the mesh already, which strengthens the case and means
the eventual split is closer than "some day" — so each document's scope is
fixed now, in a table, making that split mechanical instead of
archaeological. The folders are deliberately not restructured yet.
The skeleton takes the new vocabulary: mesh-host, mesh-substrate,
mesh-control, mesh-surfaces, mesh-catalog. Substrate drops to four services
now that identity is a hosted workload rather than a dependency.
Research 009 opens the migration, with the reframing that lowers its risk:
replace the control plane, do not move the workloads. Their data never
moves, so it is re-declared rather than adopted — which keeps adoption out
of scope, as the lab design requires. Self-hosting is the last phase, or a
failed cutover takes away the means to fix it.
The identity provider is settled as not-substrate: the mesh does not
require one, tier 2 authenticates natively, and it is a hosted service
like any other. Four substrate services, not five. The tier test's second
step gains the verb that matters — can the control plane START without it,
not function fully without it.
That verb answers the forge and the registries. They are not substrate and
they are not duplicated: the control plane starts and manages nodes
without a forge, it just cannot change itself. One gitea module, tier 4,
and the mesh's own instance is distinguished by what it is bound to rather
than by being a different module — the same answer as postgres, from the
same test. It also buys a property worth having: if the forge dies the
mesh keeps running.
Delivery needing them is not an upward dependency, resolved the way the
constitution already says to: tier 2 declares requirements, tier 4
provides implementations, the binding is data. The mechanism is
provisioning, and the new idea is that the control plane is itself a
consumer.
Self-hosting therefore becomes a state the mesh REACHES, not a
precondition. A first node comes up from pinned external artifacts and
re-binds to internal providers once they exist. Today's mesh assumes the
second state from the first moment, which is why the first-node path needs
a script that papers over an impossibility and is the least-exercised code
in the system. Made explicit, the transition is also reversible.
Research 007 and 008 opened for the two areas flagged as important and
complex, scoped from the weaknesses the as-is layer already documents
rather than started blank.
And the origin: this began as a dotfiles repository. The first two days
adopt dotfiles, add per-node overrides, and introduce service symlinking
with an ignore file. The flat one-directory-per-tool catalogue, linking
over copying, adoption of already-configured machines, per-node overrides
and the desktop modules are all inherited rather than chosen for a mesh.
That is the single most useful fact for anyone changing the catalogue, it
strengthens ADR 0018 — the case for links was never made for a mesh — and
it explains research 005's silent fifty: dotfiles-era entries for one tool
never shared a domain because they never had one.
A tier test as a decision procedure — five ordered questions, first match
wins — so placement is answerable rather than argued.
Postgres was the test case and the naive answer is wrong. Not twice, once:
the control plane cannot exist without a relational store, so it is tier 1
and lives in hal-substrate/store/postgres. What differs between the mesh's
own database and a project's is not the module but how that instance is
brought up — pinned bundle applied by the host, versus the ordinary
delivery and provisioning path. Tier is a property of the module; the
bundle is a property of the mesh's own instance. The naive answer would
also have made substrate reach up into the catalogue, which the dependency
rule forbids.
Working the test across the catalogue surfaces a third fate that neither
of research 005's options covers, and it is the most common one: absorbed
into the host, ceasing to be a module at all. That explains 005's one
positive measurement rather than confirming it — the reachability cluster
is not four modules that should be one domain module, it is four facets of
one thing the host should own, expressed as modules because a module was
the only unit available. Under this skeleton the overlay and firewall
modules stop existing. It also partly answers the silent fifty: several
are host concerns, so silence was the right signal and grouping was the
wrong inference.
Flags rather than settles: the identity provider is a genuine boundary
case (four substrate services or five), and absorbing six concerns into a
binary whose argument is that it has no dependencies is the skeleton's
biggest unproven claim.
jschoubben