Files
hq/00-META/process/04-build-handoff.md
jschoubben 87f4f29cc6 Novox Mesh, Nox, and HQ becomes company-scoped
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.
2026-08-23 21:20:35 +02:00

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# Playbook 04 — Build handoff
**Trigger.** A to-be design is settled and work is about to start in a code repository.
**Who runs it.** Whoever starts the build.
## Steps
1. **Confirm the design is settled.** Its frontmatter reads `status: designed`, and every
claim in it traces to a record in [`02-DECISIONS/`](../../02-DECISIONS/). An open question in the text is a
reason to run playbook [01](01-research.md), not to start building around it.
2. **Name the owner.** Set `code:` in the design's frontmatter to the repositories from
[`repos.md`](../repos.md). If the repository does not exist yet, add it to `repos.md` in
the same change.
3. **Check the as-is.** Read the matching `03-DESIGN/00-as-is/` document. What is being
replaced is stated there; if it is not, write it before changing it. Building against an
undocumented as-is is how a shipped behaviour gets lost.
4. **Flip the status.** `status: in-progress`, `updated:` today.
5. **Build in the code repository.** HQ is not a code repository and never carries
implementation.
6. **On completion**, run the "when something ships" section of playbook
[02](02-graduation.md).
## Rules
- Every merge is a human checkpoint, without exception.
- Never open a pull request unprompted. A permissions list saying it is allowed is not a
request.
- Work in an isolated worktree, never a shared checkout. A failed `cd` in a shared checkout
commits to the wrong branch, and the error scrolls past.