hq/AGENTS.md

Agent instructions — Novox HQ

This repository is the source of truth for Novox's mission and design — today almost entirely those of Novox Mesh, its first product (ADR 0019). Its decision records and research efforts live in the knowledge base, the seat knowledge-base (ADR 0290), and nowhere here. 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, hq-cleanup); each defers to its playbook as authoritative and adds only the mechanical scaffolding. Four reviewer agents in .claude/agents/ carry playbook 01's Review by architectural domain, two architectural domains each: review-security-and-upgrade, review-seams-and-tools, review-running-and-testing and review-health-and-events; the lead starts all four side by side, and each finding is written into the design by playbook 02 (a choice within what a record decides is the design's own; a question outside every record goes to the operator). A fifth, research-reader, carries one reading task of playbook 01's step 5: code on main, counts from the manifests, a try in process. Four more carry playbook 07: mesh-preparer (the prepare step), mesh-developer (develop), mesh-code-reviewer (the review) and mesh-watcher (every wait). A tenth, hq-design-writer, writes one set of design amendments (playbook 02, Amending an existing design) from accepted decisions and a milestone's findings, in a worktree of its own, ready for the review by architectural domain. An eleventh, hq-record-writer, proposes one decision record or research effort to the knowledge base from a draft (playbooks 01 and 02) and follows its review to approve. An agent that researches, decides, designs or reviews a design starts from the knowledge base and maps each interaction onto a mesh path. An agent that prepares, builds or reviews code starts from the milestone's part of its design alone, builds what its design lines say, and decides nothing: what the design does not answer is a design question for the operator, answered in the design before any code (playbook 07). The lead writes only the handover, never an agent's way of working and never an answer to a design question. A subagent runs in the session that started it, from hq: its way of working comes from its definition and hq's playbooks, its knowledge from the knowledge base or, for building, the design; one given a coding task works in a worktree under hq's .work/ and also reads the conventions of the repository it changes, and where those contradict hq, hq wins and the agent says so.

The development cycle

Work enters as an idea (playbook 01 — research) or a symptom (playbook 03 — issues), becomes a decision (in the knowledge base, via playbook 02), lands in a to-be design naming that decision, is handed to a code repository (playbook 04, on a feature branch per playbook 07) — and on shipping the as-is is updated and the design flips to implemented. No design without a decision; no development without a design that names its owner. Enforced by the cycle test in 00-META/checks/ alongside the records, index and words tests — run go test ./... at the root before any merge here. No code before the milestone's design answers every question its prepare found, and every commit cites the design lines it builds: playbook 07's step 0b, held by its review (step 2, item 2a).

Where to look (before assuming anything)

Question	Read
What do we test every question against?	00-META/principles.md — the short, living list of principles
What does this word mean?	00-META/glossary.md
How do I do X in this repo?	00-META/process/ — the playbook index is in 00-overview.md
What was decided, and why?	the knowledge base, through the mesh MCP server: knowledge-base.ask with the question in plain words, knowledge-base.get with a record's number (reasoning: true for the why), knowledge-base.holds with a topic of the reading order (02-DECISIONS/README.md)
What was researched?	the knowledge base: knowledge-base.ask, or knowledge-base.get with kind: research and its number
What is being built / already runs?	03-DESIGN/01-to-be/ / 03-DESIGN/00-as-is/ — each doc's frontmatter says its status, decisions and owning code
What is broken or was?	the issue tracker: issue-tracker.list and issue-tracker.get through the mesh MCP server; a design or governance issue's narrative is in 04-ISSUES/ under its number
Which repo owns what code?	00-META/repos.md
Cross-cutting status view?	the hq-status skill (generated, never stored)

A design's status lives only in its frontmatter; follow the pointers there (decisions:, code:) instead of reconstructing history from memory. A decision record's and a research effort's status and links live in the knowledge base (ADR 0290); knowledge-base.links gives a record's links both ways. An issue's status, owner and fix live in the issue tracker (ADR 0275).

Words

One name per thing. 00-META/glossary.md is the authority on vocabulary, organised by the mesh's domains (ADR 0244): controller (not "control plane"), foundation (not "substrate"), node-engine (not "the host"), a node is a machine the mesh has adopted, seat / bench / claim, package vs artifact. Use those words. A retired word is named on its replacement's Not: line, and the words test in 00-META/checks/ fails on it in running prose; a quotation keeps its words.

Ground rules

• Markdown only — but for the four checks, Go tests in the package 00-META/checks/ with go.mod at the root and no other Go code (ADR 0527), which the checker runs on every pull request as mesh/check; and 00-META/process/playbooks.html, a drawn overview of the playbooks kept for a later docs site (the operator, 2026-10-19); a change to a playbook's steps updates it in the same pull request. Nothing checks that yet: issue 1222 asks for the check. A to-be design may also keep its reference mockup, the static HTML page the operator picked, in a folder beside it (NN-mockup/, playbook 10; the operator, 2026-10-22), its data invented: no real names, addresses, domains, providers or amounts. No new top-level folders without explicit confirmation.
• Status lives in YAML frontmatter — on design docs (layer, status, code, updated, and decisions as "ADR NNNN"). A decision record's and a research effort's status live in the knowledge base, and an issue's status, owner and fix in the issue tracker, not here: an issue report carries opened and nothing of its status (playbook 03). Never create a central status file; cross-cutting views are generated when they are read.
• No decision record or research effort is written here. They live whole in the knowledge base and are written with knowledge-base.reserve and knowledge-base.propose (playbooks 01 and 02); the records test refuses a new path under 02-DECISIONS/ or 01-RESEARCH/. A record is cited as "ADR NNNN" or "research NNN".
• Decision records hold their meaning. Supersede with a new record rather than rewriting what was decided, the options weighed, or a consequence another record relies on. A progressive insight — a correction of fact that leaves the decision standing — is a new version of the record, marked and dated (playbook 02). A fact going stale is not the decision going wrong, and superseding a sound record for one buries it.
• 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 in layer:. 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.md is the source of the mesh constitution. The constitution page is derived from it — see playbook 05-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.