011 opened asking what a graph deletes and found the graph already existed. The work became design, worked through twenty cases and one provider in full. Two decisions close it. 0044 — a module declares presence, instantiation and exclusion. Two kinds of edge because a game wanting a database is not a game wanting postgres to exist: one creates something per consumer, carries credentials back, can be revoked, and leaves the provider holding state. Names are concrete unless providers are genuinely substitutable — `terminal` passes, `database` fails, and the adapter is what creates an interface. Where there is no contract there is a tag, which describes and does not bind. Exclusion is a third relation and is not derivable. A node provides names too, which makes capability checking stop being a separate mechanism and makes the host's detection an input to resolution. Constraints, never placement. Scope decides which provider and the binding is written down and sticky, in a place that follows the scope. And there are three entities, not two — the assignment carries what belongs to neither end, which is what node-agnostic modules ran out of. 0045 — a context owns its store, exclusively. No shared writes and no read roles on another context's store, because reading couples you to its layout just as firmly and invisibly. The unit is the CONTEXT, not the process: a board showing the mesh's own data is the mesh showing its own data. Asking or subscribing is derived from ADR 0036 rather than chosen. And it is the first clear list of what the design removes: grant kinds, table ownership, cross-context migration ordering, and a class of permission modelling. 0017 is superseded rather than narrowed — its text unchanged, its status changed. Folders assert relationships where edges record them, and the domain module goes with it. Left explicitly undecided in both: what a resolver delegates rather than reimplements, how many instances a module should have, and what a provider hands back.
01-RESEARCH
Investigations that have not yet hardened into design.
Structure
Each effort lives in NNN-descriptive-name/ and must contain 00-overview.md, carrying its
state in YAML frontmatter and a prose summary below it:
---
status: active | graduated | abandoned
initiated: YYYY-MM-DD
touches: [] # design docs, subsystems or areas the effort bears on
became: [] # required when status is terminal — what it turned into
---
The prose says what is being investigated, why, and what it touches. It does not restate the status — status lives in one place, and two places is one too many.
Further documents in the same folder hold the work itself: notes, evidence, option analyses, draft designs.
Lifecycle
| status | Meaning |
|---|---|
active |
Investigation in progress. |
graduated |
Checked against 00-META, decided in 02-DECISIONS/, and specified in 03-DESIGN — see became:. |
abandoned |
Stopped or superseded. Nothing is deleted. |
An effort graduates by producing a decision record and a 03-DESIGN entry. It is abandoned
in place — never deleted. What was rejected, and why, is the more expensive half to
rediscover.
Starting and closing efforts is playbook territory:
00-META/process/01-research.md and
02-graduation.md.
Rules
- Markdown only. Do not skip or reuse a sequence number.
- Evidence, not assertion. An effort that measured nothing has not finished.
- Research describes real observations but never identifies the mesh it observed. The shape of a finding survives anonymisation intact.