jschoubben
4151c28927
A build is work, not state, and that is why it does not travel as a declaration: as one it would either rebuild on every reconcile or carry "and I already did this", which is state about an event rather than about a machine. So it has its own queue and the answer comes back correlated. Three properties recorded because they are decisions: acknowledge only once the answer is away, one build at a time, and a failure is a result rather than silence. And the board page is corrected. A build result today is answered to whoever asked and kept nowhere, so a builds view has nothing to read. A record of past builds is the missing piece, not the builder.
2.9 KiB
layer, status, code, updated, decisions
| layer | status | code | updated | decisions | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| to-be | designed | 2026-08-30 |
|
A board
A place to see the mesh. Read from a survey of the one that exists, so what is proposed here is a shorter list than what is there, deliberately.
What the existing board does, and what of it belongs here
Eight sections. Four are about work and workers and are held back with the rest of that domain; the other four are about the mesh itself.
| what it shows | where it stands here | |
|---|---|---|
| the mesh | every node, what each runs, what each takes from another, module versions | everything behind it exists — it is a reader, not a second source |
| builds | a build, its stages, its log | the builder exists; what is missing is a record of past builds, since a result is answered to whoever asked and kept nowhere |
| sessions | model sessions, their usage, and switching between accounts | ADR 0024 |
| channels | nodes messaging each other | the agent layer |
The constraint that matters, and it is not a feature
The existing board is one service that reads every context's database. It joins nodes to provisions to modules to sessions by querying each store directly, because that is the shortest path to a page that shows all of them at once.
That is ADR 0008 violated by the one component with a reason to violate it, and the cost is not hypothetical — it is the same cost the shared library has: a boundary nothing may cross is a boundary that can move; one thing crossing it is enough to freeze it. A board that reads the provisioning tables directly is a board that breaks when provisioning changes its tables, and the change then gets weighed against the board.
So a board reads through interfaces and holds nothing. Everything on the mesh page above is
already answerable by asking the control plane — what nodes exist, what each resolves to, what it
takes from elsewhere, which module came from which commit. A board that asks those questions is a
client. A board that queries inventory is a second control plane with a worse contract.
It stores nothing of its own. No cache that can disagree, no table of "what the mesh looked like last time". If a question is slow to answer, the answer belongs in the context that owns it, where everything else asking gets it too.
What it is not
- Not the way to change things. Reading is the whole of it to begin with. Every action the board could offer already exists as a command, and a button that does something no command does is a second implementation of a decision.
- Not a dashboard of graphs. What a person needs from a mesh is which machine is not doing what it was told, and that is a list, not a chart.