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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.
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Agent instructions — Novox HQ
This repository is the source of truth for Novox's mission, research, design and decisions —
today almost entirely those of Novox Mesh, its first product (ADR 0019). Implementation lives in the code repositories (see
00-META/repos.md).
Before changing anything here, read the playbooks in
00-META/process/ — every workflow (research, graduation, design
amendment, issues, build handoff, constitution sync) is documented there, and agents operate
through them. Thin skills in .claude/skills/ wrap these playbooks for invocation
(hq-new-research, hq-graduate, hq-new-issue, hq-diagnose, hq-amend-design,
hq-handoff, hq-sync-constitution, hq-status); each defers to its playbook as
authoritative and adds only the mechanical scaffolding.
Ground rules
- Markdown only. No new top-level folders without explicit confirmation.
- Status lives in YAML frontmatter — on research overviews (
status,became), design docs (layer,status,code,updated), issue reports (status,located-in,fixed-by,amended-design) and decision records (status,date,deciders). Never create a central status file; cross-cutting views are generated from frontmatter. 02-DECISIONS/records are immutable. Supersede with a new record; never edit meaning. Fixing a broken link or path is allowed.- Design docs are prose and diagrams only — no code. A manifest field may be named; a manifest may not be pasted.
- Two layers, never mixed.
03-DESIGN/00-as-is/describes the mesh that exists;03-DESIGN/01-to-be/describes the one being built toward. Every design doc says which it is inlayer:. A statement about the future does not belong in an as-is document, and an as-is document is never edited to describe an intention. 00-META/how-we-build.mdis the source of the mesh constitution. The knowledge-base constitution page is derived from it — see playbook05-constitution-sync.md. Never edit the derived page directly.
This repository is public
Nothing here may contain routable addresses, real domain names, hosting providers, node
names, absolute paths, usernames, credentials, or operational detail useful only to an
attacker. Use documentation ranges (RFC 5737, RFC 1918) and role names — anchor,
home-server, workstation, laptop, the build node, the broker node.
The test: would this paragraph still teach a stranger running an entirely different mesh?
If yes, it belongs. If it only makes sense to someone who knows this installation, it is
either a note in the wrong place or a disclosure. The full rule is in
README.md.
A rule states how it is checked
If a document states a rule about the mesh, it says how that rule is verified. An unenforced rule is indistinguishable from a wrong one, and costs more, because people believe it.