jschoubben
278f7427ed
Proposed by the operator: state plainly whether adoption succeeded, partly succeeded or failed, with a severity per line. Taken with one change — the overall is DERIVED as the worst mark present, never written alongside. Two fields maintained independently drift, and a briefing reading "full success" while carrying a failed line is exactly the fault this record keeps cataloguing. An outcome computed from its lines cannot disagree with them. Four marks: ok, kept, unknown, failed. "unknown" is not a shade of success — adoption will meet configuration it cannot parse and state it cannot read, and folding those into "fine" is the same move as reporting an installed package as a capability. And adding severity reopens something the earlier rule did not cover. "Flags inform, they do not block" was decided about CONFLICTS, where the mesh chose deliberately and the machine still works. A failure is not "we chose" but "we could not". Treating both the same makes a node where something the mesh needed never happened indistinguishable from one where a log level differed.
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Stopped or superseded.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.