jschoubben
6e4fc5d69b
The sync came due for three accepted rules. Reading the target before overwriting it found the source and the enforced copy had diverged unrecorded, and that a literal republish would have DELETED rules the mesh enforces: the live page's §4 carried SOLID, layering, TypeScript strictness and DRY/YAGNI, which appear in no decision record anywhere and have been checked against for six weeks. Removal was not the safe alternative either. The orchestrator reads "when absent, no constitution is injected (backward-compatible)" — so deleting the page would not fail, it would silently inject nothing, and every design meeting would run unchecked. Three unenforced rules would have become all of them. So: absorb first. The code-quality rules land as §8 rather than §4, because appending renumbers nothing and every existing citation stays valid. They are marked as inherited — every other rule states the incident behind it, these state nothing because nothing was written down, and importing them silently would have claimed a provenance the document does not have. The review bar is resolved to a person who is not the proposer. The live page required two node operators; there is one, so the rule was never met and could not be — a rule that cannot be satisfied is not a high standard, it is one everything silently violates. Then published, and the read-back earned its place in the playbook: the FIRST publish reported success and changed nothing. New revision, new title, body unapplied — a malformed argument dropped silently. §5 demonstrating itself during its own publication.
02-DECISIONS
Architecture decision records — the "why" trail behind the rules in
00-META and the specifications in 03-DESIGN.
Numbered 02 because a decision precedes the design it authorises. Research concludes,
the decision is recorded here, and only then is the design written. Following the folder
numbers walks the process in the order it happens.
One file per decision, numbered, never deleted. A superseded record has its status: changed
and gains a pointer to what replaced it — its text is never edited. The reasoning that was
rejected is the expensive half to rediscover.
The records run in the order the decisions were taken, oldest first.
Every decision is a record. There is no ledger and no index file — if a decision is worth
recording it is worth a record, and if it is not worth a record it is not recorded
(ADR 0026). A "decision" small enough to be one line is
almost always a rule, and a rule belongs in
00-META/how-we-build.md, where it is enforced and keeps the
incident that earned it.
Frontmatter
---
status: proposed | accepted | superseded
date: YYYY-MM-DD # when the decision was taken, not when it was written down
deciders: name
reconstructed: true|false # true when the record was written after the fact from evidence
superseded-by: # 02-DECISIONS/NNNN-....md, when status is superseded
extends: # 02-DECISIONS/NNNN-....md, when this record widens an earlier one
---
Body
# N. Title in plain language
## Context what was true, with evidence
## Considered Options numbered, each with why it was rejected
## Decision what was decided
## Consequences what follows, including what got harder
## References commits, pull requests, knowledge-base entries, prior art
State evidence, not assertion. "Zero of 124 modules declare brain as a dependency"
outranks "the dependency rule is not followed".
Reconstructed records
Records 0001–0014 were written on 2026-08-23, after the decisions they describe. Records 0015 onward were taken as records. Those
decisions were taken in implementation rather than in a document; the records state what was
decided and the evidence it was decided from, and each carries reconstructed: true and says
so in its first lines.
A reconstructed record is not a transcript. Where the deliberation is not recoverable, the options section states what the alternatives were and why the chosen one won on the evidence available — not a discussion that did not happen. Where a date is not establishable it says so rather than guessing.
Index
The index is generated, not maintained — run the hq-status skill, which reads the
frontmatter of every record. A hand-written index drifts from the folder it describes, and
this one had already done so after a single addition.