jschoubben
60736199a4
Two additions from the operator, and the second answers a question this effort had open with two bad answers. Nothing is taken over without keeping what was there. Adoption happens on machines somebody is already using, and the configuration being taken over is configuration somebody chose. This is a never rule rather than a courtesy, and it earns that by the same incident the mesh's strongest rule carries: the worst loss in this record came from a tool acting on a path it did not own. Adoption is that act made deliberate, which makes the safeguard obligatory. And adoption produces a briefing, not just a result. It meets things a script cannot decide — a runtime configured one way against a mesh wanting another, a package pinned for a reason, local settings the mesh has no opinion about. Silently winning is wrong in both directions and refusing outright makes a machine in use unadoptable. So conflicts are FLAGGED: what it found, what it took over, what it could not resolve, written to be read by a person or an agent as the first thing a session on that node has to work with. That is the declaration parser's principle at a larger scale — name every problem at once, to somebody who can act on it. The question it turns on is recorded rather than assumed away: are flags advisory or blocking? A briefing nobody opens is worse than a failure, because the machine is in service and the record says it went well — 04-ISSUES/003 again. Working position: the node is usable and the mesh KNOWS it has unresolved adoption questions, as a state something can ask about rather than a document in a log directory. What that state prevents is undecided.
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.