novox/hq

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T

jschoubben 702efca6bb Base layer: the mesh as it is, under the mesh as it should be

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.

2026-08-23 03:08:26 +02:00

1.8 KiB

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Playbook 01 — Research

Trigger. An idea, technology or approach worth investigating before it is committed to design. Also: an as-is document that raises a question nobody can answer.

Who runs it. Anyone.

Steps

Take the next free number: highest 01-RESEARCH/NNN-* plus one, zero-padded to three digits. Never skip or reuse a number.

Create 01-RESEARCH/NNN-descriptive-name/ and a status.md in it carrying:

---
status: active
initiated: YYYY-MM-DD
touches: []          # areas, subsystems or as-is design docs the effort bears on
---

Then a short prose summary: what is being investigated, why, and what it touches.

Do the research in further documents in the same folder — notes, option analyses, evidence, draft designs. Anything goes. Keep the summary in status.md current as the effort changes shape.

What makes research worth reading

State evidence, not assertion. "Zero of 124 modules declare brain as a dependency" outranks "the dependency rule is not followed". An effort that measured nothing has not finished.

Research describes real observations but never identifies the mesh it observed. The shape of a finding survives anonymisation intact — a node publicly named but behind a household NAT carries the whole lesson without naming anything.

Do not

Do not put status in prose. It lives in status.md's frontmatter, and the prose must not restate it.
Do not set became: while the effort is open — playbook 02 sets it at closure.
Do not write into 02-DESIGN from an open effort.

Closing

An effort never just stops. It closes through playbook 02 as graduated or abandoned, always with became: pointing at what it turned into. Nothing is deleted — what was rejected, and why, is the more expensive half to rediscover.

1.8 KiB Raw Blame History