jschoubben
1ee62392b9
Written after porting the first real workload end to end. Every step exists because skipping it cost something, and the ratio is recorded because it is the lesson: six attempts, one real bug, and the mesh was right every time. The rule worth carrying out of it: read the host's log before theorising. A declaration that was sent and not applied says so there and nowhere else — it took an hour to look, and the answer was one line.
3.2 KiB
Process — overview
How work moves through HQ, and who may do what. Every other document in this folder is a playbook: trigger, who runs it, steps, outputs. Engineers and agents follow the same playbooks; agents must not act outside them.
The audiences
| Audience | Contract |
|---|---|
| Engineers | Read and write everything. HQ is the single source of truth for mission, research, design, decisions and issue diagnosis. |
| Agents | The same rights as engineers, exercised through these playbooks. |
| Anyone else | This repository is public and written for them, but it is not a support channel. Nothing here identifies the mesh it describes. |
The knowledge flow
idea ──► 01-RESEARCH ──► decision (02-DECISIONS/) ──► 03-DESIGN/01-to-be ──► built (code repo)
│ │ │
│ │ └─► 03-DESIGN/00-as-is once shipped
│ └────► abandoned (recorded, kept)
└─(small/obvious, still recorded in 02-DECISIONS)──────────► 03-DESIGN directly
symptom ──► 04-ISSUES ──► diagnosis ──► code-repo fix and/or design amendment
how-we-build.md ──► constitution sync ──► knowledge base ──► injected into design meetings
The two design layers
03-DESIGN holds two layers that are never mixed:
| Layer | What it is | Changes when |
|---|---|---|
00-as-is/ |
The mesh that exists today. Describes shipped behaviour, including behaviour nobody would choose again. | Something ships, or an as-is claim is found to be wrong. |
01-to-be/ |
The mesh being built toward. Every statement traceable to a record in 02-DECISIONS/. |
A decision is taken or amended. |
A to-be document that ships does not move. Its as-is counterpart is written or updated, the
to-be document's frontmatter goes to 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.
The playbooks
| # | Playbook | Trigger |
|---|---|---|
| 01 | Research | An idea worth investigating before committing to design |
| 02 | Graduation & design change | Research concludes, or a design must change |
| 03 | Issues | Something is wrong — often with the owner unknown |
| 04 | Build handoff | A design is ready to be built |
| 05 | Constitution sync | how-we-build.md changed a rule the mesh enforces |
| 06 | Writing a module | Something that runs today must run on the mesh |
Status lives in frontmatter
Research overviews, design docs, issue reports and decision records each carry their status as
YAML frontmatter (schemas in the section READMEs and playbooks). There are no central status
files and no decision ledger. Every decision is a record in
02-DECISIONS — if it is worth recording it is worth a record, and if
it is not worth a record it is not recorded. Cross-cutting views, the decision index included,
are generated on demand by the hq-status skill and never written to disk.