jschoubben
60aea14935
Same gap as the control plane: load-bearing and unpinned. The substrate is what the control plane CONSUMES AND CANNOT GRANT ITSELF. Every module needing a database asks provisioning for one; the control plane needs one too and cannot ask itself, because it is not running yet. That circularity is not an awkwardness to work around — it is the definition, and anything on the wrong side of it must be raised by the bundle the host carries. Which answers 006's open question in the honest form rather than with a number. The identity provider is substrate only if the control plane DELEGATES authentication — then it cannot serve anybody before the provider exists and cannot grant itself a client. If it authenticates natively, the provider is an ordinary hosted service. So the count follows from a decision not yet taken, and asserting four was asserting that decision. The test also rules out the tempting wrong answer: an identity provider, a mail server and an analytics service are all infrastructure by any ordinary reading, and none are substrate, because the control plane starts and runs without them. Important is not the test. Records why the bundle is pinned by hand — it is applied when no mesh exists, so nothing can resolve a version or ask a registry — and why it must be self-contained, which makes it an artifact built on a machine with a network for a machine that may have none.
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.