Files
hq/03-DESIGN
jschoubben 4bf7a35568 Close the record on the lab
Playbook 02 and 04 were followed for the substance — decisions before design,
design before build — and skipped for the bookkeeping. This closes that.

004 graduates. Its one open item was "not yet stood up"; the lab is stood up,
and the substitution the effort turned on is now enforced by the validator
before anything is raised rather than left as a thing to remember. Its
certificate conclusion has a home in 01-end-to-end-testing and is designed but
not built — implementation is a third axis, and an effort graduates on its
conclusions.

One item leaves 004 without a home and is recorded rather than lost: the reverse
proxy does not set caServer, so it defaults to the production endpoint.

The two lab designs read `designed` while running in production of a sort, so
they become `in-progress`.

And the lab gets an as-is document, which it did not have. It records what runs
including the parts nobody would choose again: that `place:` is refused and the
lab therefore raises EMPTY MACHINES, that the drawing shipped with no design
document behind it, that a router is tagged as a machine for a reason found by a
bug, and that the integration suite raises two of five scenarios while both
faults found so far lived in the three it does not.

006 stays active, deliberately. Two of its open questions ARE the tier 0 design
— whether absorbing six concerns makes the host too large, and whether an
unprivileged node earns a place in the inventory. Playbook 04 is explicit that
an open question is a reason to research, not to build around.
2026-08-25 01:55:52 +02:00
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2026-08-25 01:55:52 +02:00
2026-08-25 01:55:52 +02:00

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.