HAL — HQ

The single source of truth for what the HAL mesh is, what it is becoming, and why. Implementation lives in modules/; the reasoning behind it lives here.

Structure

Folder	Purpose
00-META	Mission, foundational context, the rules that hold across the mesh, the repository map, and the process playbooks. The northern star for every decision.
01-RESEARCH	Active and historical investigations, before they harden into design.
02-DECISIONS	Numbered decision records, in the order the decisions were taken — what was chosen, and what was rejected.
03-DESIGN	The authoritative specification, in two layers: 00-as-is — the mesh that exists — and 01-to-be — the one being built toward.
04-ISSUES	The front door for "something is wrong" at the level of design or governance.

The numbering is the flow. Research produces a decision; the decision authorises a design. That is why decisions are 02 and design is 03 — a reader following the numbers walks the process in the order it happens.

The flow

idea ──► 01-RESEARCH ──► decision (02-DECISIONS/) ──► 03-DESIGN/01-to-be ──► built (code repo)
 │            │                                      │
 │            │                                      └─► 03-DESIGN/00-as-is once shipped
 │            └────► abandoned (recorded, kept)
 └─(small/obvious, still recorded in 02-DECISIONS)──────────► 03-DESIGN directly

symptom ──► 04-ISSUES ──► diagnosis ──► code-repo fix and/or design amendment

00-META/how-we-build.md ──► sync ──► the constitution the mesh injects into design sessions

Implementation lives in the code repositories — see 00-META/repos.md. Every workflow is a playbook in 00-META/process/; agents operate through them and not outside them.

Rules

• Markdown only.
• No new top-level folders without explicit confirmation.
• Knowledge flows GENESIS → RESEARCH → DESIGN. Research graduates into design only after analysis against GENESIS confirms alignment, and only through a recorded decision.
• Status lives in frontmatter, never in a central status file. Cross-cutting views are generated on demand, never hand-maintained.
• GENESIS and DESIGN are instance-agnostic. They describe the mesh as a concept — no machine names, no counts, no topology. A reader must not be able to tell how many nodes the author happened to have.
• RESEARCH describes real observations, but never identifies the mesh it observed. Evidence is what makes research worth reading, and the shape of a finding survives anonymisation intact — a node publicly named but behind a household NAT carries the whole lesson without naming anything.
• The as-is layer records what is, not what should be — including behaviour nobody would choose again. A layer that keeps only the good decisions is a brochure.
• A document that states a rule about the mesh should say how that rule is checked. This repository has a rule requiring every capability-exposing module to declare the core runtime as a dependency; zero modules do. An unenforced rule is indistinguishable from a wrong one.

This repository is public

Written for a reader who is not its author and has no access to the mesh it describes. Concretely, nothing here may contain:

• routable addresses, real domain names, hosting providers, or node names — use the documentation ranges (RFC 5737 203.0.113.0/24, RFC 1918) and role names such as anchor, home-server, workstation, laptop
• absolute paths from anyone's machine, usernames, home directories, or email addresses
• credentials in any form, including lengths or hashes of live secrets
• operational detail that is only useful to an attacker — which host is the VPN hub, on which port, which node is reachable only through a forwarded port

Private-range addresses and the overlay plan are fine: they describe a pattern, not a target.

The test is whether a paragraph would still teach something to a stranger running an entirely different mesh. If it would, it belongs. If it only makes sense to someone who knows this particular installation, it is either a note in the wrong place or a disclosure.

Why this is its own repository

It began inside the code repository, on the reasoning that HAL already has a mesh-native knowledge store and that adding a fourth knowledge system would repeat the mistake this folder was created to fix.

That objection was about a fourth knowledge system, and the answer offered was indexing rather than location — that these documents would be indexed into the knowledge base, so a symptom search returns them beside everything else. One source, many surfaces. Where the source is authored is then a separate question.

That indexing does not exist. It was checked on 2026-08-23 and returns nothing; it appears never to have existed. Until it does, the objection stands unanswered and this repository is the fourth knowledge system it was argued not to be. Recorded as 04-ISSUES/006, and left standing here rather than quietly reworded, because a claim that held up a decision and was never checked is precisely the failure this repository exists to name.

Answered separately, a repository of its own is the better home:

• The cadence is different. A decision changes when thinking changes, not when code changes. Tying documents to a code branch means they merge on the code's schedule.
• The reviewers are different. A design argument is not reviewed the way an implementation is, and it should not queue behind a build.
• The scope is wider than one repository. ADR 0015 sends most modules out of the monorepo entirely. Documentation that governs several repositories cannot live inside one of them.

The trade is real and worth naming: a change to a document and the change to the code it describes can no longer land in one commit. Keeping them honest is a discipline now rather than a mechanism — which is why every decision is recorded in 02-DECISIONS as it is taken, and why a document that states a rule should say how the rule is checked.

Recorded as ADR 0019.