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Jochen asked whether the order made sense. It did not -- it followed when things happened to be decided, which after consolidation is fictional anyway since record 5 alone folds decisions taken across a week. Concretely wrong before: the domain statement sat at 8, after five engineering rules; the constitution was scattered across 5, 12 and 17; the tiers landed at 15, 16, 21 and 22 with process records in between. Now it walks: what the mesh is (1-3), its tiers from the bottom up (4-8), what runs on them and how it gets there (9-10), how it is built (11-16), how it is checked (17-18), how we work (19-23). Two things made this safe rather than free. It is a permutation, not a compaction, so the renames go through temporary names -- otherwise two files want one slot and one is lost. And the reference rewrite is a single simultaneous pass, because almost every number moved into a slot another number was vacating; replacing one at a time would have cascaded and pointed things at the wrong record while still resolving. Verified: 284 [ADR NNNN](path) links across the repository, all with matching text and target. The ordering principle is now stated in 19 rather than left implicit -- the repository already said "the numbering is the flow" about its folders, and there was no reason for the records to be the exception.
54 lines
3.2 KiB
Markdown
54 lines
3.2 KiB
Markdown
# 00-META
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The **northern star**. What the mesh is, the environment it runs in, and what changes when it
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works — plus the engineering practice that holds across everything Novox builds. Every research effort and design decision is checked against this folder.
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| File / folder | Purpose |
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|------|---------|
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| [`mission.md`](mission.md) | Vision, mission, and the values that decide arguments |
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| [`context.md`](context.md) | The environment — conditions, not aspirations |
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| [`effect.md`](effect.md) | What is different when the work is done |
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| [`how-we-build.md`](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. |
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| [`repos.md`](repos.md) | Where implementation lives, and what each repository owns |
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| [`process/`](process/) | The playbooks — how work moves through this repository, for engineers and agents alike |
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## Rules
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- Markdown only.
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- **Stable by nature.** Changes here reflect a genuine shift in intent, not iteration. The one
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exception is `how-we-build.md`, which changes whenever a rule is earned — and only through
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its amendment process.
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- Research and design must be traceable back to what is written here.
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- **Instance-agnostic.** These documents describe the mesh as a concept. No machine names, no
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counts, no topology.
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## On the architecture overview in the code repository
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The code repository carries an architecture overview predating this folder. It is a useful
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description of *how* the mesh works, and its content now lives — anonymised and checked against
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the implementation — in [`03-DESIGN/00-as-is/`](../03-DESIGN/00-as-is/). GENESIS answers *why*;
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that document answered *how*, which is the design layer's job.
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It had also drifted from the implementation in ways worth recording, since both were found by
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comparing it against the code rather than by anyone noticing:
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- It described the pipeline as having a separate builder process and a build stage that
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packages. Neither was true after 2026-08-04; the documents stayed stale until 2026-08-06
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([ADR 0010](../02-DECISIONS/0010-delivery.md)).
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- It listed the mesh as spanning a fixed number of named machines, which is exactly the
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content this repository cannot carry.
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It also lists **"symlinks, not copies" as a key design principle**, and that is a genuine
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contradiction rather than a stale detail. The mesh's stated intent is that it creates no
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symlinks at all — the rule is not merely "only the installer may link", and a founding document
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elevating linking to a principle points the opposite way from where this is going.
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What exists today is that the installer owns and reconciles every link
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([ADR 0012](../02-DECISIONS/0012-the-mesh-creates-no-symlinks.md)) — an as-is fact, recorded in
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[`03-DESIGN/00-as-is/05-runtime-and-installation.md`](../03-DESIGN/00-as-is/05-runtime-and-installation.md).
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Centralising who may link narrowed the incident class; it did not close it. The intent is to
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remove the mechanism, recorded as [ADR 0012](../02-DECISIONS/0012-the-mesh-creates-no-symlinks.md).
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A founding document contradicting the direction of travel is precisely the failure this folder
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exists to prevent.
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