jschoubben
333356cff3
Jochen asked whether the order made sense. It did not -- it followed when things happened to be decided, which after consolidation is fictional anyway since record 5 alone folds decisions taken across a week. Concretely wrong before: the domain statement sat at 8, after five engineering rules; the constitution was scattered across 5, 12 and 17; the tiers landed at 15, 16, 21 and 22 with process records in between. Now it walks: what the mesh is (1-3), its tiers from the bottom up (4-8), what runs on them and how it gets there (9-10), how it is built (11-16), how it is checked (17-18), how we work (19-23). Two things made this safe rather than free. It is a permutation, not a compaction, so the renames go through temporary names -- otherwise two files want one slot and one is lost. And the reference rewrite is a single simultaneous pass, because almost every number moved into a slot another number was vacating; replacing one at a time would have cascaded and pointed things at the wrong record while still resolving. Verified: 284 [ADR NNNN](path) links across the repository, all with matching text and target. The ordering principle is now stated in 19 rather than left implicit -- the repository already said "the numbering is the flow" about its folders, and there was no reason for the records to be the exception.
64 lines
3.0 KiB
Markdown
64 lines
3.0 KiB
Markdown
---
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status: accepted
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date: 2026-07-10
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deciders: jochen
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reconstructed: true
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---
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# 20. The mesh is governed by a constitution, injected where work is decided
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> Reconstructed after the fact from the evidence cited below.
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## Context
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By mid-2026 the mesh was doing a large share of its own design and implementation work through
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agents. The rules those agents were expected to follow existed — in operating instructions, in
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convention documents, in the knowledge base — but they were **retrieved**: an agent had to know
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a rule existed in order to look it up.
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Rules that must be looked up are followed by whoever already knows them, which is precisely the
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population that does not need them. The rules being violated were the ones nobody thought to
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search for.
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## Considered options
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1. **Documentation plus review.** Rejected — it is what existed. Review catches a violation
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after the work is done, and only if the reviewer knows the rule.
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2. **Lint and automated checks only.** Rejected as insufficient, not wrong. A check catches
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what can be expressed mechanically; most of these rules are about judgement — what belongs
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in a repository, when a criterion counts as verified.
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3. **A canonical rule set, injected into context wherever work is decided, with a check phase
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before output is accepted.** Chosen.
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## Decision
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A single canonical document states the mesh's non-negotiable rules. It is **injected
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proactively** into every eligible design and analysis session — agents do not fetch it, it
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arrives — and a check phase verifies the session's output against it before the work proceeds.
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It is a governed document, not a page. Changing it requires a proposal, sign-off by reviewers
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who are not the proposer, and a recorded decision. Drive-by edits are reverted.
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Scoped override pages may **tighten** it for a team or product. They may never relax it.
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## Consequences
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- A rule reaches the work whether or not anyone remembered it existed.
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- The check phase makes a violation a blocking outcome rather than a review comment.
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- Two copies of the same rules now exist: this document, and the reasoning in HQ that earned
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them. The enforced copy wins by default, so the reasoned copy quietly stops being true —
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which is why [`00-META/how-we-build.md`](../00-META/how-we-build.md) is now the source
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and the governed page is derived from it, via playbook
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[`05-constitution-sync.md`](../00-META/process/05-constitution-sync.md).
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- Injection costs context on every eligible turn, and grows with the document. Nothing
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currently bounds that.
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- The amendment process requires two reviewers, which a mesh with one human operator satisfies
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only by counting agents. That tension is real and unresolved.
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## References
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- The governed page was authored 2026-07-10 and carries its own amendment process.
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- `feat(noxflow): HAL architectural conformance gate for reviewer + architect` (#296),
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2026-06-10 — the check phase, predating the document it checks against.
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- Knowledge base: `platform/constitution`.
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