jschoubben
34551a3b8a
A page nobody had thought to ask for turns out to be the one a person opens first: what is not doing what it was told. Recorded with the order that matters — broken, then quiet, then out of date — because a page leading with the last would bury the first. And refused stays distinct from failed all the way to the page. They are fixed in different places, so one word for both sends half its readers to the wrong one.
75 lines
4.0 KiB
Markdown
75 lines
4.0 KiB
Markdown
---
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layer: to-be
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status: designed
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code: []
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updated: 2026-08-30
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decisions:
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- 02-DECISIONS/0008-a-context-owns-its-store.md
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- 02-DECISIONS/0001-mesh-brokers-nodes-host-agents-think.md
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---
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# A board
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**A place to see the mesh.** Read from a survey of the one that exists, so what is proposed here
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is a shorter list than what is there, deliberately.
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## What the existing board does, and what of it belongs here
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Eight sections. Four are about work and workers and are held back with the rest of that domain;
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the other four are about the mesh itself.
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| | what it shows | where it stands here |
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|---|---|---|
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| **the mesh** | every node, what each runs, what each takes from another, module versions | **everything behind it exists** — it is a reader, not a second source |
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| **what is wrong** | machines not doing what they were told, machines not answering | **the page nobody had thought to ask for**, and the one a person opens first |
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| **builds** | a build, its stages, its log | **everything behind it exists** — every result is kept, failures included |
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| **sessions** | model sessions, their usage, and switching between accounts | [ADR 0024](../../02-DECISIONS/0024-model-access-is-a-provision.md) |
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| **channels** | nodes messaging each other | the agent layer |
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## The constraint that matters, and it is not a feature
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**The existing board is one service that reads every context's database.** It joins nodes to
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provisions to modules to sessions by querying each store directly, because that is the shortest
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path to a page that shows all of them at once.
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That is [ADR 0008](../../02-DECISIONS/0008-a-context-owns-its-store.md) violated by the one
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component with a reason to violate it, and the cost is not hypothetical — it is the same cost the
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shared library has: **a boundary nothing may cross is a boundary that can move; one thing crossing
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it is enough to freeze it.** A board that reads the provisioning tables directly is a board that
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breaks when provisioning changes its tables, and the change then gets weighed against the board.
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**So a board reads through interfaces and holds nothing.** Everything on the mesh page above is
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already answerable by asking the control plane — what nodes exist, what each resolves to, what it
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takes from elsewhere, which module came from which commit. A board that asks those questions is a
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client. A board that queries `inventory` is a second control plane with a worse contract.
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**It stores nothing of its own.** No cache that can disagree, no table of "what the mesh looked
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like last time". If a question is slow to answer, the answer belongs in the context that owns it,
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where everything else asking gets it too.
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## What it is not
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- **Not the way to change things.** Reading is the whole of it to begin with. Every action the
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board could offer already exists as a command, and a button that does something no command does
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is a second implementation of a decision.
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- **Not a dashboard of graphs.** What a person needs from a mesh is *which machine is not doing
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what it was told*, and that is a list, not a chart.
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## The three questions, in order
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Written down because the order is the design. A person opens this when something is wrong, and a
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page that led with the third would bury the first:
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1. **Is anything broken?** A machine whose last declaration was refused or partly failed. It has
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consequences now.
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2. **Is anything not answering?** A machine not heard from. It may be new, switched off or
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unreachable — **which is not the same as tried and could not**, and collapsing the two sends
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somebody to debug a machine that was never sent anything.
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3. **Is anything out of date?** A module behind its source, and the machines running the old one.
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A plan for later rather than a problem now.
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**Refused and failed stay distinct all the way to the page.** Refused means the machine is exactly
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as it was and what is wrong is in what was sent; failed means it is in a state nobody declared and
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what is wrong is on the machine. They are fixed in different places, so a page that said "error"
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for both would send half its readers to the wrong one.
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