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hq/03-DESIGN
jschoubben 10fa7c76d7 The substrate is a store and a broker
Third correction to one table today, found the same way as the other
two: by asking whether both halves of the test were answered, or only
the easy one.

0006 admits the registry because "it cannot grant itself a repository" —
true, and the second half. Nothing established that the control plane
needs one in order to run. Counted rather than argued: the bundle raises
twelve resources and no registry is among them. The registry arrives
afterwards as an ordinary module, which is exactly what the lab asserts.

0006 half-said this already, calling it "substrate by role and ordinary
by delivery, provisioned once there is a control plane to do it". A
member provisioned by the thing it supposedly precedes is not a member;
that phrase was carrying a contradiction rather than resolving one.

The registry is a closer call than the object store and the difference
is worth keeping: the control plane never touches an object store at
all, but it genuinely uses the registry. So the registry is a real
dependency of the mesh operating and not of the control plane starting —
and it is the second that the word means.

The substrate is now exactly what the bundle raises, which is the
strongest form the list can take: checkable by counting rather than by
reading an argument, and the two cannot drift.

The finding is not about substrates. A test with two conditions is a
test only when both are asked.
2026-08-31 20:30:19 +02:00
..

03-DESIGN

The authoritative specification. Implementation is built against what is written here.

Two layers

Folder What it is
00-as-is/ The mesh that exists today. Shipped behaviour, described as it is — including behaviour nobody would choose again.
01-to-be/ The mesh being built toward. Every statement traceable to a record in 02-DECISIONS/.

They are never mixed. 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.

When a to-be design ships, it does not move. Its as-is counterpart is written or updated, the to-be document's status becomes implemented, and both stand — one describing what runs, the other recording what was intended. Deleting the intention loses the reasoning, which is the expensive half.

Frontmatter

Every design document (not the READMEs) carries:

---
layer: as-is | to-be
status: designed | in-progress | implemented | abandoned
code: []                 # owning code repo(s), from 00-META/repos.md
updated: YYYY-MM-DD      # date of the last status change, not of text edits
decisions: []            # 02-DECISIONS/ records this document rests on
---

For an as-is document, status: implemented is the normal state — it describes something that runs — and code: names where that implementation lives.

Status changes when implementation state changes, never because design text was edited. An implemented claim must be defensible from the owning repository's main branch, not from intent. If it cannot be checked, it is in-progress.

Cross-cutting views are generated from this frontmatter by the hq-status skill and never written to disk.

What belongs here

Functional analysis, architectural description, and specification — prose and diagrams only, no code. A manifest field may be named; a manifest may not be pasted. A document enters the to-be layer only after the decision behind it is recorded in 02-DECISIONS/ and the research that produced it is closed.

Subfolders are encouraged where a layer grows enough to need them.