jschoubben
33a00d5656
"control plane" -> controller and "substrate" -> foundation throughout 03-DESIGN, 00-META and the README, with 06-the-control-plane.md and 07-the-substrate.md renamed to 06-the-controller.md and 07-the-foundation.md. The immutable 02-DECISIONS records keep their original wording (and links to them are unchanged) — a term retired here may still appear there, which the glossary explains how to read. Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01D6qtiYU3P9jk3pnAXyAFyx
45 lines
2.1 KiB
Markdown
45 lines
2.1 KiB
Markdown
---
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status: canonical
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updated: 2026-08-22
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---
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# Engineering Context
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The conditions the mesh is built for. Properties, not an inventory — no node here is
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named, and nothing should be designed around a particular one existing.
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## Mandatory
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- **Nodes are heterogeneous.** Desktops, laptops and servers, with different hardware,
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different operating systems and wildly different uptime. A design that assumes uniform
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nodes does not survive contact.
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- **Some nodes are mobile and frequently absent.** They sleep, change networks and lose
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addressability. A node being unreachable is ordinary operation, never an incident.
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- **At least one node must be stably addressable.** Central components — transport,
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registry, artifact storage — can only live where they can always be reached. That is a
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property some node must have, not an identity a particular node holds.
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- **Human agents are few — often one — and usually asleep.** There is no team, no rota, no
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second reviewer. Anything requiring a human to notice it will be noticed late.
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- **Nodes are personal.** A human agent works on the same node the mesh runs on. The mesh
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is a guest there and must not make a node worse to use.
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## Default
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- **Self-hosted throughout.** Transport, state, artifacts and memory run on nodes the mesh
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owns, not a managed service.
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- **A hosted model provider** supplies the thinking for non-human agents, drawn from a
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shared pool of subscriptions — which is why budget pacing is a first-class concern.
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- **Long-lived user services** rather than an orchestrator. No cluster scheduler, no cloud
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controller.
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Defaults, not mandates. A second model provider is anticipated by design; nothing in the
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domain may assume one vendor's credential lifecycle.
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## Deviations
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- **No enterprise identity.** No directory, no SSO. Identity is mesh-internal.
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- **Public exposure is minimal.** Only nodes that must terminate public traffic do so.
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- **Agents share a pool of provider subscriptions** rather than holding billing
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relationships of their own. A consequence of personal-scale infrastructure, and the
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reason spend must be paced rather than merely billed.
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