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status: canonical
updated: 2026-08-22
---

# Engineering Context

The conditions the mesh is built for. Properties, not an inventory — no node here is
named, and nothing should be designed around a particular one existing.

## Mandatory

- **Nodes are heterogeneous.** Desktops, laptops and servers, with different hardware,
  different operating systems and wildly different uptime. A design that assumes uniform
  nodes does not survive contact.
- **Some nodes are mobile and frequently absent.** They sleep, change networks and lose
  addressability. A node being unreachable is ordinary operation, never an incident.
- **At least one node must be stably addressable.** Central components — transport,
  registry, artifact storage — can only live where they can always be reached. That is a
  property some node must have, not an identity a particular node holds.
- **Human agents are few — often one — and usually asleep.** There is no team, no rota, no
  second reviewer. Anything requiring a human to notice it will be noticed late.
- **Nodes are personal.** A human agent works on the same node the mesh runs on. The mesh
  is a guest there and must not make a node worse to use.

## Default

- **Self-hosted throughout.** Transport, state, artifacts and memory run on nodes the mesh
  owns, not a managed service.
- **A hosted model provider** supplies the thinking for non-human agents, drawn from a
  shared pool of subscriptions — which is why budget pacing is a first-class concern.
- **Long-lived user services** rather than an orchestrator. No cluster scheduler, no cloud
  control plane.

Defaults, not mandates. A second model provider is anticipated by design; nothing in the
domain may assume one vendor's credential lifecycle.

## Deviations

- **No enterprise identity.** No directory, no SSO. Identity is mesh-internal.
- **Public exposure is minimal.** Only nodes that must terminate public traffic do so.
- **Agents share a pool of provider subscriptions** rather than holding billing
  relationships of their own. A consequence of personal-scale infrastructure, and the
  reason spend must be paced rather than merely billed.