Reading a converged machine's rendered rules showed the cause: the chain blocks everything passing through and then allows the machine's own containers back by listing their address ranges. 0137 made that list typeable and 0139 tried to generate it; both refined a list that should not exist, because the mesh has no position on a container reaching outward. Constrain what arrives from outside, allow what did not, and let the machine report which links face outside — one fact instead of a list. Ports keep following the modules unchanged. The records check now allows one record to supersede several, and stops requiring a withdrawn record's own citations to be live.
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.