jschoubben
ce6ae943b7
Both lines of work numbered from the same point, so four decision records and one design document existed twice with different content. The trunk keeps its numbers and this branch yields — the only rule that scales, because the trunk's are already cited by what merged before them. 0117 the bus is the only broker -> 0125 0118 a module declares its own seats -> 0126 0119 amqp is a provision, not the bus -> 0127 0120 the mesh bus is required -> 0128 0123 a seat carries its role's protocol -> 0129 0124 the predecessor is ending -> 0130 design 29, what a module declares -> design 32 Applied to the code repositories too, because a stale reference is worse when numbers collide than when they dangle: the reader lands on a real record that decided something else. Two reconciliations the merge forced, both real: **0110 was marked wholly superseded and was not.** Its successor says in as many words that everything 0110 decided about what a seat *is* stands untouched — and two records that landed on the trunk rest on exactly that part. So it is accepted again, extended rather than replaced, with a note saying which of its claims moved and where. **A seat's protocol becomes columns, not fields.** The trunk moved the seat set out of compiled code into a table the controller owns. This branch had added what a role accepts, emits and serves to the Go slice. The decision is unaffected and the mechanism is better for it: giving a role a protocol is now a write rather than a rebuild, which is the trunk's own argument applied to what this branch added. One check still fails and it fails on main too: a record resting on ADR 0112 while that is still 'proposed'. Left alone — it is not this merge's to answer.
00-META
The northern star. What the mesh is, the environment it runs in, and what changes when it works — plus the engineering practice that holds across everything Novox builds. Every research effort and design decision is checked against this folder.
| File / folder | Purpose |
|---|---|
mission.md |
Vision, mission, and the values that decide arguments |
context.md |
The environment — conditions, not aspirations |
effect.md |
What is different when the work is done |
how-we-build.md |
The rules that hold across the mesh, each one earned. The source of the mesh constitution — the governed page the mesh injects into design sessions is derived from it. |
glossary.md |
One name per thing — the authority on vocabulary, and the words that were retired |
repos.md |
Where implementation lives, and what each repository owns |
process/ |
The playbooks — how work moves through this repository, for engineers and agents alike |
Rules
- Markdown only.
- Stable by nature. Changes here reflect a genuine shift in intent, not iteration. The one
exception is
how-we-build.md, which changes whenever a rule is earned — and only through its amendment process. - Research and design must be traceable back to what is written here.
- Instance-agnostic. These documents describe the mesh as a concept. No machine names, no counts, no topology.
On the architecture overview in the code repository
The code repository carries an architecture overview predating this folder. It is a useful
description of how the mesh works, and its content now lives — anonymised and checked against
the implementation — in 03-DESIGN/00-as-is/. GENESIS answers why;
that document answered how, which is the design layer's job.
It had also drifted from the implementation in ways worth recording, since both were found by comparing it against the code rather than by anyone noticing:
- It described the pipeline as having a separate builder process and a build stage that packages. Neither was true after 2026-08-04; the documents stayed stale until 2026-08-06 (ADR 0010).
- It listed the mesh as spanning a fixed number of named machines, which is exactly the content this repository cannot carry.
It also lists "symlinks, not copies" as a key design principle, and that is a genuine contradiction rather than a stale detail. The mesh's stated intent is that it creates no symlinks at all — the rule is not merely "only the installer may link", and a founding document elevating linking to a principle points the opposite way from where this is going.
What exists today is that the installer owns and reconciles every link
(ADR 0012) — an as-is fact, recorded in
03-DESIGN/00-as-is/05-runtime-and-installation.md.
Centralising who may link narrowed the incident class; it did not close it. The intent is to
remove the mechanism, recorded as ADR 0012.
A founding document contradicting the direction of travel is precisely the failure this folder exists to prevent.