jschoubben
03874f3fe2
Nothing in this repository was verified by anything but reading, which is how a superseded decision stayed live in the constitution and in the to-be README at the same time. Both were found by a person looking, and nothing stopped a third. Five checks: links resolve; `decisions:`/`extends:` name records that exist and are accepted; a governing document citing a superseded record must name its replacement in the same paragraph; supersession is symmetric; filename number matches heading number. Each was made to fail before it was made to pass. The live-citation check was verified against a reconstruction of the actual incident -- the to-be README citing ADR 0017 as live guidance -- and reports it with file and line. It found one thing nobody had noticed: ADR 0018 never declared that it superseded 0011, though 0011 has named 0018 as its superseder since August. Fixed. Deliberately not checked, and said so in the README: 02-DECISIONS and 01-RESEARCH may cite superseded records freely, because a decision record discusses history and research records what was observed. 00-as-is may rest on one, per 0056. Flagging those would put noise on correct documents, and a check that cries wolf gets suppressed -- which costs more than not having it. Two bugs found by running it: the frontmatter reader iterated an inline list as characters, and the as-is exemption was missing entirely.
00-META
The northern star. What the mesh is, the environment it runs in, and what changes when it works — plus the engineering practice that holds across everything Novox builds. Every research effort and design decision is checked against this folder.
| File / folder | Purpose |
|---|---|
mission.md |
Vision, mission, and the values that decide arguments |
context.md |
The environment — conditions, not aspirations |
effect.md |
What is different when the work is done |
how-we-build.md |
The rules that hold across the mesh, each one earned. The source of the mesh constitution — the governed page the mesh injects into design sessions is derived from it. |
repos.md |
Where implementation lives, and what each repository owns |
process/ |
The playbooks — how work moves through this repository, for engineers and agents alike |
Rules
- Markdown only.
- Stable by nature. Changes here reflect a genuine shift in intent, not iteration. The one
exception is
how-we-build.md, which changes whenever a rule is earned — and only through its amendment process. - Research and design must be traceable back to what is written here.
- Instance-agnostic. These documents describe the mesh as a concept. No machine names, no counts, no topology.
On the architecture overview in the code repository
The code repository carries an architecture overview predating this folder. It is a useful
description of how the mesh works, and its content now lives — anonymised and checked against
the implementation — in 03-DESIGN/00-as-is/. GENESIS answers why;
that document answered how, which is the design layer's job.
It had also drifted from the implementation in ways worth recording, since both were found by comparing it against the code rather than by anyone noticing:
- It described the pipeline as having a separate builder process and a build stage that packages. Neither was true after 2026-08-04; the documents stayed stale until 2026-08-06 (ADR 0014).
- It listed the mesh as spanning a fixed number of named machines, which is exactly the content this repository cannot carry.
It also lists "symlinks, not copies" as a key design principle, and that is a genuine contradiction rather than a stale detail. The mesh's stated intent is that it creates no symlinks at all — the rule is not merely "only the installer may link", and a founding document elevating linking to a principle points the opposite way from where this is going.
What exists today is that the installer owns and reconciles every link
(ADR 0011) — an as-is fact, recorded in
03-DESIGN/00-as-is/05-runtime-and-installation.md.
Centralising who may link narrowed the incident class; it did not close it. The intent is to
remove the mechanism, recorded as ADR 0018.
A founding document contradicting the direction of travel is precisely the failure this folder exists to prevent.