jschoubben
c0b35652d0
papa-hq reads 01 research -> 03 decision -> 02 design. The order is a scar, not a choice: 02-DESIGN existed from its initial commit, and when adr/ was finally promoted on 2026-07-13 it took the next free number rather than its place in the sequence. By then design was too settled to renumber. hal-hq was three commits old, so it is not. adr/ becomes 02-DECISIONS and 02-DESIGN becomes 03-DESIGN, and following the folder numbers now walks the process in the order it happens: research produces a decision, the decision authorises a design. 00-GENESIS becomes 00-META, matching papa's rename from the same restructure. Every path reference rewritten across documents, frontmatter, playbooks and skills. All links resolve; all 58 frontmatter blocks parse and their path fields still point at files that exist.
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Agent instructions — hal-hq
This repository is the source of truth for the HAL mesh's mission, research, design and
decisions. 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
(hal-new-research, hal-graduate, hal-new-issue, hal-diagnose, hal-amend-design,
hal-handoff, hal-sync-constitution, hal-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.