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Every step from a bare machine to a mesh that maintains itself, in three phases, with each step named as the installer prints it. The point of writing it out is the shape it exposes. The installer owns twelve steps and ends at a mesh that RUNS. Seven more turn that into a mesh that WORKS — the shared base, a store that is a provider rather than the control plane's own memory, the catalogue, the replay of what was built before the catalogue existed, the control plane rebuilt through the module path, the private network with the node actually placed on it, and the packet filter. None of those seven is the installer's. They are things somebody types, which is why a test had to be written to discover they were missing. Machines arrive last, in phase three, because a machine joining a mesh that cannot build anything proves enrolment works and nothing else. And five things that are not yet true are named rather than implied: phase two is manual, a second machine cannot pull what the mesh built, ADR 0014 assumes a private package registry that genesis has not installed when the first build needs it, the host agent does not survive a reboot, and nothing can contradict a claim that a machine was installed this way. Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01D6qtiYU3P9jk3pnAXyAFyx
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.