jschoubben
3f6d939930
papa-hq has no ledger. Its root is AGENTS.md, CLAUDE.md, README.md, every decision is a numbered record, and its graduation playbook has no path for an unrecorded decision. hal-hq now matches. The ledger's 41 entries classified as: 10 restating a record, 11 restating design docs, 15 describing how this repository works with the reasoning sitting in a README rather than anywhere citable, 3 small rules with no home, 2 superseded stubs. Mostly a copy — and a hand-maintained index, the exact pattern ADR 0022 had just rejected for the decision index on the grounds it drifted after one addition. Keeping one copy of that while removing another is not a position. It also collided by name with 02-DECISIONS/ in any directory listing. Nothing was dropped. Records 0019-0025 give the repository decisions the reasoning they never had: HQ is its own repository and is public, design has two layers, work moves through playbooks, status lives in frontmatter, issues have a front door, the numbering is the flow, HQ is the source of the constitution. 0026 records the ledger's own removal. The three orphan rules went to how-we-build, where a rule is enforced and keeps the incident that earned it — the package rule was genuinely unwritten anywhere. Two lab decisions stated only in the ledger went into the lab design. "Deliberately not decided" went to the research effort and design document each question actually belongs to. The chronological view the ledger provided is now generated from record frontmatter, which is what it was for. The cost, stated in 0026 rather than glossed: a record is more work than a table row, so the risk is a small decision going unrecorded because nobody wanted to write a document. how-we-build takes rules cheaply, which is the mitigation, not a solution.
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Process — overview
How work moves through hal-hq, and who may do what. Every other document in this folder is a playbook: trigger, who runs it, steps, outputs. Engineers and agents follow the same playbooks; agents must not act outside them.
The audiences
| Audience | Contract |
|---|---|
| Engineers | Read and write everything. hal-hq is the single source of truth for mission, research, design, decisions and issue diagnosis. |
| Agents | The same rights as engineers, exercised through these playbooks. |
| Anyone else | This repository is public and written for them, but it is not a support channel. Nothing here identifies the mesh it describes. |
The knowledge flow
idea ──► 01-RESEARCH ──► decision (02-DECISIONS/) ──► 03-DESIGN/01-to-be ──► built (code repo)
│ │ │
│ │ └─► 03-DESIGN/00-as-is once shipped
│ └────► abandoned (recorded, kept)
└─(small/obvious, still recorded in 02-DECISIONS)──────────► 03-DESIGN directly
symptom ──► 04-ISSUES ──► diagnosis ──► code-repo fix and/or design amendment
how-we-build.md ──► constitution sync ──► knowledge base ──► injected into design meetings
The two design layers
03-DESIGN holds two layers that are never mixed:
| Layer | What it is | Changes when |
|---|---|---|
00-as-is/ |
The mesh that exists today. Describes shipped behaviour, including behaviour nobody would choose again. | Something ships, or an as-is claim is found to be wrong. |
01-to-be/ |
The mesh being built toward. Every statement traceable to a record in 02-DECISIONS/. |
A decision is taken or amended. |
A to-be document that ships does not move. Its as-is counterpart is written or updated, the
to-be document's frontmatter goes to 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.
The playbooks
| # | Playbook | Trigger |
|---|---|---|
| 01 | Research | An idea worth investigating before committing to design |
| 02 | Graduation & design change | Research concludes, or a design must change |
| 03 | Issues | Something is wrong — often with the owner unknown |
| 04 | Build handoff | A design is ready to be built |
| 05 | Constitution sync | how-we-build.md changed a rule the mesh enforces |
Status lives in frontmatter
Research overviews, design docs, issue reports and decision records each carry their status as
YAML frontmatter (schemas in the section READMEs and playbooks). There are no central status
files and no decision ledger. Every decision is a record in
02-DECISIONS — if it is worth recording it is worth a record, and if
it is not worth a record it is not recorded. Cross-cutting views, the decision index included,
are generated on demand by the hal-status skill and never written to disk.