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.
56 lines
2.9 KiB
Markdown
56 lines
2.9 KiB
Markdown
---
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layer: to-be
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status: designed
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code: []
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updated: 2026-08-30
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decisions:
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- 02-DECISIONS/0008-a-context-owns-its-store.md
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- 02-DECISIONS/0001-mesh-brokers-nodes-host-agents-think.md
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---
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# A board
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**A place to see the mesh.** Read from a survey of the one that exists, so what is proposed here
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is a shorter list than what is there, deliberately.
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## What the existing board does, and what of it belongs here
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Eight sections. Four are about work and workers and are held back with the rest of that domain;
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the other four are about the mesh itself.
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| | what it shows | where it stands here |
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|---|---|---|
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| **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 |
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| **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 |
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| **sessions** | model sessions, their usage, and switching between accounts | [ADR 0024](../../02-DECISIONS/0024-model-access-is-a-provision.md) |
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| **channels** | nodes messaging each other | the agent layer |
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## The constraint that matters, and it is not a feature
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**The existing board is one service that reads every context's database.** It joins nodes to
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provisions to modules to sessions by querying each store directly, because that is the shortest
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path to a page that shows all of them at once.
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That is [ADR 0008](../../02-DECISIONS/0008-a-context-owns-its-store.md) violated by the one
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component with a reason to violate it, and the cost is not hypothetical — it is the same cost the
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shared library has: **a boundary nothing may cross is a boundary that can move; one thing crossing
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it is enough to freeze it.** A board that reads the provisioning tables directly is a board that
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breaks when provisioning changes its tables, and the change then gets weighed against the board.
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**So a board reads through interfaces and holds nothing.** Everything on the mesh page above is
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already answerable by asking the control plane — what nodes exist, what each resolves to, what it
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takes from elsewhere, which module came from which commit. A board that asks those questions is a
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client. A board that queries `inventory` is a second control plane with a worse contract.
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**It stores nothing of its own.** No cache that can disagree, no table of "what the mesh looked
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like last time". If a question is slow to answer, the answer belongs in the context that owns it,
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where everything else asking gets it too.
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## What it is not
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- **Not the way to change things.** Reading is the whole of it to begin with. Every action the
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board could offer already exists as a command, and a button that does something no command does
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is a second implementation of a decision.
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- **Not a dashboard of graphs.** What a person needs from a mesh is *which machine is not doing
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what it was told*, and that is a list, not a chart.
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