jochen
4a1b218706
Decided with the author: - A seat is held by one assignment, not claimed by a definition. A definition says which seats a module can hold; an assignment says which it does. The store module can run on every node and one assignment holds mesh-store; moving a role changes an assignment, never a definition. The foundation's seats name what the mesh itself uses and route no consumer — database and amqp consumers use co-location, the holder included. This replaces the wrong rationale that the foundation's store is "provider to nobody", which contradicted ADR 0078 and to-be 21. 0079's one-postgres rule becomes one mesh-store holder. - A module is assigned at most once to a node. The instance identity in 0112 and 27 is withdrawn, and the login-length problem with it. Review fixes to 0113: - The bottom of the stack: the vault is installed as soon as the shared runtime base exists, and genesis generates everything needed until then — including the permanent controller's, the control-node agent's, the builder's and the broker provisioner's bus accounts, and the controller's store login. Genesis creates those accounts until the broker's provisioner runs and adopts them. - Genesis's values are delivered recorded as the mesh's own, so 0092's never-replace rule for operator values does not make them unrotatable. - Backend-issued secrets (a forge's once-only API token) enter through the vault. Non-module parties (the controller's logins, node agents' accounts) are answered the same way, the controller asking on their behalf; an enrolment token reaches the controller only as what verifies it. - A secret with no provisioner to apply it is marked not rotatable by the mesh and refused, instead of a restart reported as done. Unused password generators in six provider clients are removed, and a catalogue scan checks no module mints. - Rotation's lock-out cases (offline reader, bus account owner, restarted provisioner) are recorded as open, with overlap and re-confirm-with-safeguards as the two answers, to be chosen before acceptance. 0110, 0111 and 26 are marked proposed: they changed in meaning and are under review, and an accepted record must not rest on proposed ones. To-be 23 and the glossary are restored to main; they change when these records are accepted.
Novox HQ
The single source of truth for what Novox builds — what it is, what it is becoming,
and why. Today that is almost entirely Novox Mesh, the foundation everything else runs on. Implementation lives in modules/; the reasoning behind it lives here.
Structure
| Folder | Purpose |
|---|---|
00-META |
Mission, foundational context, the rules that hold across the mesh, the repository map, and the process playbooks. The northern star for every decision. |
01-RESEARCH |
Active and historical investigations, before they harden into design. |
02-DECISIONS |
Numbered decision records, in the order the decisions were taken — what was chosen, and what was rejected. |
03-DESIGN |
The authoritative specification, in two layers: 00-as-is — the mesh that exists — and 01-to-be — the one being built toward. |
04-ISSUES |
The front door for "something is wrong" at the level of design or governance. |
The numbering is the flow. Research produces a decision; the decision authorises a design.
That is why decisions are 02 and design is 03 — a reader following the numbers walks the
process in the order it happens.
The 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
00-META/how-we-build.md ──► sync ──► the constitution the mesh injects into design sessions
Implementation lives in the code repositories — see
00-META/repos.md. Every workflow is a playbook in
00-META/process/; agents operate through them and not outside them.
Rules
- Markdown only.
- No new top-level folders without explicit confirmation.
- Knowledge flows
GENESIS → RESEARCH → DESIGN. Research graduates into design only after analysis against GENESIS confirms alignment, and only through a recorded decision. - Status lives in frontmatter, never in a central status file. Cross-cutting views are generated on demand, never hand-maintained.
- GENESIS and DESIGN are instance-agnostic. They describe the mesh as a concept — no machine names, no counts, no topology. A reader must not be able to tell how many nodes the author happened to have.
- RESEARCH describes real observations, but never identifies the mesh it observed. Evidence is what makes research worth reading, and the shape of a finding survives anonymisation intact — a node publicly named but behind a household NAT carries the whole lesson without naming anything.
- The as-is layer records what is, not what should be — including behaviour nobody would choose again. A layer that keeps only the good decisions is a brochure.
- A document that states a rule about the mesh should say how that rule is checked. This repository has a rule requiring every capability-exposing module to declare the core runtime as a dependency; zero modules do. An unenforced rule is indistinguishable from a wrong one.
This repository is public
Written for a reader who is not its author and has no access to the mesh it describes. Concretely, nothing here may contain:
- routable addresses, real domain names, hosting providers, or node names — use the
documentation ranges (RFC 5737
203.0.113.0/24, RFC 1918) and role names such asanchor,home-server,workstation,laptop - absolute paths from anyone's machine, usernames, home directories, or email addresses
- credentials in any form, including lengths or hashes of live secrets
- operational detail that is only useful to an attacker — which host is the VPN hub, on which port, which node is reachable only through a forwarded port
Private-range addresses and the overlay plan are fine: they describe a pattern, not a target.
The test is whether a paragraph would still teach something to a stranger running an entirely different mesh. If it would, it belongs. If it only makes sense to someone who knows this particular installation, it is either a note in the wrong place or a disclosure.
Why this is its own repository
It began inside the code repository, on the reasoning that the mesh already has a mesh-native knowledge store and that adding a fourth knowledge system would repeat the mistake this folder was created to fix.
That objection was about a fourth knowledge system, and the answer offered was indexing rather than location — that these documents would be indexed into the knowledge base, so a symptom search returns them beside everything else. One source, many surfaces. Where the source is authored is then a separate question.
That indexing does not exist. It was checked on 2026-08-23 and returns nothing; it appears
never to have existed. Until it does, the objection stands unanswered and this repository is
the fourth knowledge system it was argued not to be. Recorded as
04-ISSUES/006, and
left standing here rather than quietly reworded, because a claim that held up a decision and
was never checked is precisely the failure this repository exists to name.
Answered separately, a repository of its own is the better home:
- The cadence is different. A decision changes when thinking changes, not when code changes. Tying documents to a code branch means they merge on the code's schedule.
- The reviewers are different. A design argument is not reviewed the way an implementation is, and it should not queue behind a build.
- The scope is wider than one repository. ADR 0001 sends most modules out of the monorepo entirely. Documentation that governs several repositories cannot live inside one of them.
The trade is real and worth naming: a change to a document and the change to the code it
describes can no longer land in one commit. Keeping them honest is a discipline now rather
than a mechanism — which is why every decision is recorded in
02-DECISIONS as it is taken, and why a document that states a rule should
say how the rule is checked.
Recorded as ADR 0019.