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hq/01-RESEARCH/001-module-domain-decomposition/00-overview.md
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jschoubben 333356cff3 Order the records the way the system is learned
Jochen asked whether the order made sense. It did not -- it followed when
things happened to be decided, which after consolidation is fictional anyway
since record 5 alone folds decisions taken across a week.

Concretely wrong before: the domain statement sat at 8, after five engineering
rules; the constitution was scattered across 5, 12 and 17; the tiers landed at
15, 16, 21 and 22 with process records in between.

Now it walks: what the mesh is (1-3), its tiers from the bottom up (4-8), what
runs on them and how it gets there (9-10), how it is built (11-16), how it is
checked (17-18), how we work (19-23).

Two things made this safe rather than free. It is a permutation, not a
compaction, so the renames go through temporary names -- otherwise two files
want one slot and one is lost. And the reference rewrite is a single
simultaneous pass, because almost every number moved into a slot another number
was vacating; replacing one at a time would have cascaded and pointed things at
the wrong record while still resolving.

Verified: 284 [ADR NNNN](path) links across the repository, all with matching
text and target.

The ordering principle is now stated in 19 rather than left implicit -- the
repository already said "the numbering is the flow" about its folders, and
there was no reason for the records to be the exception.
2026-08-28 23:30:42 +02:00

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---
status: active
initiated: 2026-08-22
touches: [03-DESIGN/00-as-is/02-modules-and-manifests.md, 03-DESIGN/00-as-is/10-module-catalogue.md, 03-DESIGN/01-to-be/00-work-breakdown.md]
became: [02-DECISIONS/0001-mesh-brokers-nodes-host-agents-think.md]
---
# 001 — Module domain decomposition
- **Initiated by:** jochen, 2026-08-22
- **Areas touched:** every `hal/*` and `noxflow/*` module; the pipeline's dependency
graph; the knowledge base; agent identity and credentials.
## Summary
HAL has 124 modules. That number is not a maintenance problem in itself — it is the
**symptom of missing bounded contexts**. Modules are split not because they model
different domains, but because splitting is the only lever the platform offers:
- no way to run one daemon on one node without making it a module
(`hal/claude-licences` — one daemon, single-node)
- no way to expose two of a kind from one module
- no namespace separating the mesh from the software it runs
This effort establishes the **current state**, the **ideal state**, and the sequence
between them.
## Trigger
A night of debugging that produced four fixes and one conclusion. Every fault was a
boundary fault:
- Per-agent Claude credentials had to be written by the *noxflow runtime*, because
`agents.claude_account` is in noxflow's database — even though agent identity is a
mesh concept and node identity already lives in the mesh registry.
- Whether `hal/brain` may depend on noxflow took three attempts to answer, twice
wrongly, because the ownership boundary was never stated.
- Authoritative documentation existed in `mesh_docs` and was not found, while a
proposal in repo markdown was invisible to search entirely.
## Decisions taken (2026-08-22)
| Question | Decision |
|---|---|
| What should noxflow become? | Decompose into `hal/*` modules; noxflow returns to tasks/workflows |
| Who owns agent identity? | `hal/agents` — a mesh concept, alongside nodes |
| Where do third-party apps live? | Out of this repo. They run *on* the mesh; they are not *of* it |
| Knowledge structure | Modelled on `papa-hq`; implementation choice left open |
## Open questions
Tracked in [`analysis.md`](analysis.md) under "Open questions".
## Deliberately not decided
Recorded so they are not mistaken for oversights. Each is open, and each comes out of
[ADR 0001](../../02-DECISIONS/0001-mesh-brokers-nodes-host-agents-think.md); this effort stays
`active` until they are answered.
| Question | Status |
|---|---|
| `hal/scheduler` — infrastructure, or part of the work context. | Open. |
| Which context owns the executor. | Open. |
| Catalogue destination — one repository or many. | Open. Phase 4. |
| What the shared library keeps after extraction. | Open. Phase 3. |
| Where human agent modality is recorded — which user, on which node, a human agent acts as. | Open. Required by the model; not yet stored. |
| Which domains the modules outside the platform core group into. | Open, from [ADR 0009](../../02-DECISIONS/0009-modules-and-the-graph.md), which settles the principle and deliberately not the list. |