First end-to-end raise. A machine with a container runtime applied the bundle its host carries and ended with a store, databases, schemas, a broker holding a certificate it generated itself, and the control plane serving. Then it took a token, checked the broker against the pinned fingerprint, generated three keypairs and enrolled — the first node being a node whose mesh is not up yet, observed rather than argued. And a credential crossed. Declared the provider of a database for a second node and pushed to over the broker, the machine ended with the password in one file at mode 0600, and that password appears nowhere in the declaration that crossed the broker, nowhere in the control plane's database, and nowhere in what the node reported back. That is the whole secrets argument, measured. One fault, in the joining: the token did not say what the mesh calls the machine, so enrolment needed a flag its own help said it did not, and failed at the broker with an empty username. It is the fifth thing a token carries now — the node cannot work its own name out, because the broker account it authenticates as is named after it and exists before the mesh has told it anything.
03-DESIGN
The authoritative specification. Implementation is built against what is written here.
Two layers
| Folder | What it is |
|---|---|
00-as-is/ |
The mesh that exists today. Shipped behaviour, described as it is — including behaviour nobody would choose again. |
01-to-be/ |
The mesh being built toward. Every statement traceable to a record in 02-DECISIONS/. |
They are never mixed. A statement about the future does not belong in an as-is document, and an as-is document is never edited to describe an intention.
When a to-be design ships, it does not move. Its as-is counterpart is written or updated,
the to-be document's status becomes implemented, and both stand — one describing what runs,
the other recording what was intended. Deleting the intention loses the reasoning, which is
the expensive half.
Frontmatter
Every design document (not the READMEs) carries:
---
layer: as-is | to-be
status: designed | in-progress | implemented | abandoned
code: [] # owning code repo(s), from 00-META/repos.md
updated: YYYY-MM-DD # date of the last status change, not of text edits
decisions: [] # 02-DECISIONS/ records this document rests on
---
For an as-is document, status: implemented is the normal state — it describes something that
runs — and code: names where that implementation lives.
Status changes when implementation state changes, never because design text was edited. An
implemented claim must be defensible from the owning repository's main branch, not from
intent. If it cannot be checked, it is in-progress.
Cross-cutting views are generated from this frontmatter by the hq-status skill and never
written to disk.
What belongs here
Functional analysis, architectural description, and specification — prose and diagrams
only, no code. A manifest field may be named; a manifest may not be pasted. A document
enters the to-be layer only after the decision behind it is recorded in 02-DECISIONS/
and the research that produced it is closed.
Subfolders are encouraged where a layer grows enough to need them.