Playbook 02 and 04 were followed for the substance — decisions before design, design before build — and skipped for the bookkeeping. This closes that. 004 graduates. Its one open item was "not yet stood up"; the lab is stood up, and the substitution the effort turned on is now enforced by the validator before anything is raised rather than left as a thing to remember. Its certificate conclusion has a home in 01-end-to-end-testing and is designed but not built — implementation is a third axis, and an effort graduates on its conclusions. One item leaves 004 without a home and is recorded rather than lost: the reverse proxy does not set caServer, so it defaults to the production endpoint. The two lab designs read `designed` while running in production of a sort, so they become `in-progress`. And the lab gets an as-is document, which it did not have. It records what runs including the parts nobody would choose again: that `place:` is refused and the lab therefore raises EMPTY MACHINES, that the drawing shipped with no design document behind it, that a router is tagged as a machine for a reason found by a bug, and that the integration suite raises two of five scenarios while both faults found so far lived in the three it does not. 006 stays active, deliberately. Two of its open questions ARE the tier 0 design — whether absorbing six concerns makes the host too large, and whether an unprivileged node earns a place in the inventory. Playbook 04 is explicit that an open question is a reason to research, not to build around.
01-RESEARCH
Investigations that have not yet hardened into design.
Structure
Each effort lives in NNN-descriptive-name/ and must contain 00-overview.md, carrying its
state in YAML frontmatter and a prose summary below it:
---
status: active | graduated | abandoned
initiated: YYYY-MM-DD
touches: [] # design docs, subsystems or areas the effort bears on
became: [] # required when status is terminal — what it turned into
---
The prose says what is being investigated, why, and what it touches. It does not restate the status — status lives in one place, and two places is one too many.
Further documents in the same folder hold the work itself: notes, evidence, option analyses, draft designs.
Lifecycle
| status | Meaning |
|---|---|
active |
Investigation in progress. |
graduated |
Checked against 00-META, decided in 02-DECISIONS/, and specified in 03-DESIGN — see became:. |
abandoned |
Stopped or superseded. Nothing is deleted. |
An effort graduates by producing a decision record and a 03-DESIGN entry. It is abandoned
in place — never deleted. What was rejected, and why, is the more expensive half to
rediscover.
Starting and closing efforts is playbook territory:
00-META/process/01-research.md and
02-graduation.md.
Rules
- Markdown only. Do not skip or reuse a sequence number.
- Evidence, not assertion. An effort that measured nothing has not finished.
- Research describes real observations but never identifies the mesh it observed. The shape of a finding survives anonymisation intact.