---
topic: how we work
status: accepted
date: 2026-07-10
deciders: jochen
reconstructed: true
---

# 20. The mesh is governed by a constitution, injected where work is decided

> Reconstructed after the fact from the evidence cited below.

## Context

By mid-2026 the mesh was doing a large share of its own design and implementation work through
agents. The rules those agents were expected to follow existed — in operating instructions, in
convention documents, in the knowledge base — but they were **retrieved**: an agent had to know
a rule existed in order to look it up.

Rules that must be looked up are followed by whoever already knows them, which is precisely the
population that does not need them. The rules being violated were the ones nobody thought to
search for.

## Considered options

1. **Documentation plus review.** Rejected — it is what existed. Review catches a violation
   after the work is done, and only if the reviewer knows the rule.
2. **Lint and automated checks only.** Rejected as insufficient, not wrong. A check catches
   what can be expressed mechanically; most of these rules are about judgement — what belongs
   in a repository, when a criterion counts as verified.
3. **A canonical rule set, injected into context wherever work is decided, with a check phase
   before output is accepted.** Chosen.

## Decision

A single canonical document states the mesh's non-negotiable rules. It is **injected
proactively** into every eligible design and analysis session — agents do not fetch it, it
arrives — and a check phase verifies the session's output against it before the work proceeds.

It is a governed document, not a page. Changing it requires a proposal, sign-off by reviewers
who are not the proposer, and a recorded decision. Drive-by edits are reverted.

Scoped override pages may **tighten** it for a team or product. They may never relax it.

## Consequences

- A rule reaches the work whether or not anyone remembered it existed.
- The check phase makes a violation a blocking outcome rather than a review comment.
- Two copies of the same rules now exist: this document, and the reasoning in HQ that earned
  them. The enforced copy wins by default, so the reasoned copy quietly stops being true —
  which is why [`00-META/how-we-build.md`](../00-META/how-we-build.md) is now the source
  and the governed page is derived from it, via playbook
  [`05-constitution-sync.md`](../00-META/process/05-constitution-sync.md).
- Injection costs context on every eligible turn, and grows with the document. Nothing
  currently bounds that.
- The amendment process requires two reviewers, which a mesh with one human operator satisfies
  only by counting agents. That tension is real and unresolved.

## References

- The governed page was authored 2026-07-10 and carries its own amendment process.
- `feat(noxflow): HAL architectural conformance gate for reviewer + architect` (#296),
  2026-06-10 — the check phase, predating the document it checks against.
- Knowledge base: `platform/constitution`.