jschoubben
785cd229b3
Writes round 1's musts into the lines they name. A build edge is met by a running holder. An act cut off by a move ends through its failure path. Pins survive a race and a restart, and the gate restates them. Each point's digest is kept on the bus. The words of a failed build move to the assigner's hold. Also writes the operator's answers of 14:55 and 15:15 CET: three automatic rebuilds and then an ask; the image registry copies its template keys at its first start; refused asks kept are a setting. Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01JG73KEq4zoDfM9WtYpcQgZ
00-META
The northern star. What the mesh is, the environment it runs in, and what changes when it works — plus the engineering practice that holds across everything Novox builds. Every research effort and design decision is checked against this folder.
| File / folder | Purpose |
|---|---|
mission.md |
Vision, mission, and the values that decide arguments |
context.md |
The environment — conditions, not aspirations |
effect.md |
What is different when the work is done |
how-we-build.md |
The rules that hold across the mesh, each one earned. The source of the mesh constitution — the governed page the mesh injects into design sessions is derived from it. |
glossary.md |
One name per thing — the authority on vocabulary, and the words that were retired |
repos.md |
Where implementation lives, and what each repository owns |
process/ |
The playbooks — how work moves through this repository, for engineers and agents alike |
Rules
- Markdown only, but for the checks and one drawn overview of the playbooks (
process/playbooks.html). - Stable by nature. Changes here reflect a genuine shift in intent, not iteration. The one
exception is
how-we-build.md, which changes whenever a rule is earned — and only through its amendment process. - Research and design must be traceable back to what is written here.
- Instance-agnostic. These documents describe the mesh as a concept. No machine names, no counts, no topology.
On the architecture overview in the code repository
The code repository carries an architecture overview predating this folder. It is a useful
description of how the mesh works, and its content now lives — anonymised and checked against
the implementation — in 03-DESIGN/00-as-is/. GENESIS answers why;
that document answered how, which is the design layer's job.
It had also drifted from the implementation in ways worth recording, since both were found by comparing it against the code rather than by anyone noticing:
- It described the pipeline as having a separate builder process and a build stage that packages. Neither was true after 2026-08-04; the documents stayed stale until 2026-08-06 (ADR 0010).
- It listed the mesh as spanning a fixed number of named machines, which is exactly the content this repository cannot carry.
It also lists "symlinks, not copies" as a key design principle, and that is a genuine contradiction rather than a stale detail. The mesh's stated intent is that it creates no symlinks at all — the rule is not merely "only the installer may link", and a founding document elevating linking to a principle points the opposite way from where this is going.
What exists today is that the installer owns and reconciles every link
(ADR 0012) — an as-is fact, recorded in
03-DESIGN/00-as-is/05-runtime-and-installation.md.
Centralising who may link narrowed the incident class; it did not close it. The intent is to
remove the mechanism, recorded as ADR 0012.
A founding document contradicting the direction of travel is precisely the failure this folder exists to prevent.