jschoubben
702efca6bb
HQ held only the to-be. Every reader had to already know the system the decisions were about, and an as-is claim had nowhere to live except inside an intention. Adds 02-DESIGN/00-as-is — eleven documents written from the implementation and the operational record, not from intent, including the parts nobody would choose again. The two existing designs move under 01-to-be. Layers are declared in frontmatter and never mix: a design that ships does not move, its as-is counterpart is written, and both stand. Back-fills adr/0001-0014 for decisions taken in implementation and never recorded — the broker, the module abstraction, the mesh database, managed files, provisioning, migrations, the workspace removal, failing loudly, the constitution, application placement, linking, the employee model, the artifact, the three silos. Each marked reconstructed, dated from the history, and citing the evidence it was recovered from. The two existing records renumber to 0015 and 0016 so the ledger runs oldest first; 0017 extends 0015 to modules outside the core, principle only — the domain list is deliberately not invented here. how-we-build.md becomes the source of the mesh constitution, with a sync playbook, so the enforced copy stops being the only one that is true. Process becomes explicit: five playbooks, eight thin skills that defer to them, a repository map, and AGENTS.md with CLAUDE.md as its include. The five Observations become 04-ISSUES 001-005 where they can be owned and closed. 006 is new and uncomfortable: HQ is not indexed into the knowledge base. That claim is what decision 27 rests on, it was never checked, and the README now says so instead of repeating it. Also corrects the ADR index into something generated, the "02-DESIGN is empty" claim, the VISION.md pointer that did not survive the repo split, and a note asserting the symlink rule was contradicted — it was a misreading; the rule forbids hand-made links, the installer links by design.
45 lines
2.1 KiB
Markdown
45 lines
2.1 KiB
Markdown
---
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status: canonical
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updated: 2026-08-22
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---
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# Engineering Context
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The conditions the mesh is built for. Properties, not an inventory — no node here is
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named, and nothing should be designed around a particular one existing.
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## Mandatory
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- **Nodes are heterogeneous.** Desktops, laptops and servers, with different hardware,
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different operating systems and wildly different uptime. A design that assumes uniform
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nodes does not survive contact.
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- **Some nodes are mobile and frequently absent.** They sleep, change networks and lose
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addressability. A node being unreachable is ordinary operation, never an incident.
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- **At least one node must be stably addressable.** Central components — transport,
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registry, artifact storage — can only live where they can always be reached. That is a
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property some node must have, not an identity a particular node holds.
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- **Human agents are few — often one — and usually asleep.** There is no team, no rota, no
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second reviewer. Anything requiring a human to notice it will be noticed late.
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- **Nodes are personal.** A human agent works on the same node the mesh runs on. The mesh
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is a guest there and must not make a node worse to use.
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## Default
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- **Self-hosted throughout.** Transport, state, artifacts and memory run on nodes the mesh
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owns, not a managed service.
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- **A hosted model provider** supplies the thinking for non-human agents, drawn from a
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shared pool of subscriptions — which is why budget pacing is a first-class concern.
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- **Long-lived user services** rather than an orchestrator. No cluster scheduler, no cloud
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control plane.
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Defaults, not mandates. A second model provider is anticipated by design; nothing in the
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domain may assume one vendor's credential lifecycle.
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## Deviations
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- **No enterprise identity.** No directory, no SSO. Identity is mesh-internal.
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- **Public exposure is minimal.** Only nodes that must terminate public traffic do so.
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- **Agents share a pool of provider subscriptions** rather than holding billing
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relationships of their own. A consequence of personal-scale infrastructure, and the
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reason spend must be paced rather than merely billed.
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