jschoubben
85f972749a
0117 went a step further than it had grounds for. It was right that the bus is the only bus, and wrong that the amqp interface must therefore retire — because it conflated two reasons to want a broker. Using one to reach another module is a second bus and stays refused. Needing an AMQP broker as a backing service, the way something needs a database, is ordinary, and forbidding it would make the mesh unable to run normal software while calling that architecture. So the broker becomes a plain provider module: no seat, not foundation, never raised at genesis, no retirement condition. lavinmq now claims nothing and provides amqp; nats claims mesh-broker and provides nothing. The rule that survives is about direction, not software: inter-module communication goes over the bus. A module may hold a broker for itself; it may not use one as a channel to another module. That is a review judgement where 0117 could have used a parser, which is the honest cost. 0106's progressive insight was itself wrong and is corrected by a second one there — nothing moves off the old broker, so its "one purpose" sentence does not become true, it is just not what that server is. The insight check needed two fixes it found itself: a date may carry trailing words, and a bold run with a link is discussing an insight rather than marking one. All four bad shapes still fire.
00-META
The northern star. What the mesh is, the environment it runs in, and what changes when it works — plus the engineering practice that holds across everything Novox builds. Every research effort and design decision is checked against this folder.
| File / folder | Purpose |
|---|---|
mission.md |
Vision, mission, and the values that decide arguments |
context.md |
The environment — conditions, not aspirations |
effect.md |
What is different when the work is done |
how-we-build.md |
The rules that hold across the mesh, each one earned. The source of the mesh constitution — the governed page the mesh injects into design sessions is derived from it. |
glossary.md |
One name per thing — the authority on vocabulary, and the words that were retired |
repos.md |
Where implementation lives, and what each repository owns |
process/ |
The playbooks — how work moves through this repository, for engineers and agents alike |
Rules
- Markdown only.
- Stable by nature. Changes here reflect a genuine shift in intent, not iteration. The one
exception is
how-we-build.md, which changes whenever a rule is earned — and only through its amendment process. - Research and design must be traceable back to what is written here.
- Instance-agnostic. These documents describe the mesh as a concept. No machine names, no counts, no topology.
On the architecture overview in the code repository
The code repository carries an architecture overview predating this folder. It is a useful
description of how the mesh works, and its content now lives — anonymised and checked against
the implementation — in 03-DESIGN/00-as-is/. GENESIS answers why;
that document answered how, which is the design layer's job.
It had also drifted from the implementation in ways worth recording, since both were found by comparing it against the code rather than by anyone noticing:
- It described the pipeline as having a separate builder process and a build stage that packages. Neither was true after 2026-08-04; the documents stayed stale until 2026-08-06 (ADR 0010).
- It listed the mesh as spanning a fixed number of named machines, which is exactly the content this repository cannot carry.
It also lists "symlinks, not copies" as a key design principle, and that is a genuine contradiction rather than a stale detail. The mesh's stated intent is that it creates no symlinks at all — the rule is not merely "only the installer may link", and a founding document elevating linking to a principle points the opposite way from where this is going.
What exists today is that the installer owns and reconciles every link
(ADR 0012) — an as-is fact, recorded in
03-DESIGN/00-as-is/05-runtime-and-installation.md.
Centralising who may link narrowed the incident class; it did not close it. The intent is to
remove the mechanism, recorded as ADR 0012.
A founding document contradicting the direction of travel is precisely the failure this folder exists to prevent.