Files
hq/01-RESEARCH/001-module-domain-decomposition/status.md
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

2.2 KiB

status, initiated, touches, became
status initiated touches became
ongoing 2026-08-22
02-DESIGN/00-as-is/02-modules-and-manifests.md
02-DESIGN/00-as-is/10-module-catalogue.md
02-DESIGN/01-to-be/00-work-breakdown.md
adr/0015-mesh-brokers-nodes-host-agents-think.md

001 — Module domain decomposition

  • Initiated by: jochen, 2026-08-22
  • Areas touched: every hal/* and noxflow/* module; the pipeline's dependency graph; the knowledge base; agent identity and credentials.

Summary

HAL has 124 modules. That number is not a maintenance problem in itself — it is the symptom of missing bounded contexts. Modules are split not because they model different domains, but because splitting is the only lever the platform offers:

  • no way to run one daemon on one node without making it a module (hal/claude-licences — one daemon, single-node)
  • no way to expose two of a kind from one module
  • no namespace separating the mesh from the software it runs

This effort establishes the current state, the ideal state, and the sequence between them.

Trigger

A night of debugging that produced four fixes and one conclusion. Every fault was a boundary fault:

  • Per-agent Claude credentials had to be written by the noxflow runtime, because agents.claude_account is in noxflow's database — even though agent identity is a mesh concept and node identity already lives in the mesh registry.
  • Whether hal/brain may depend on noxflow took three attempts to answer, twice wrongly, because the ownership boundary was never stated.
  • Authoritative documentation existed in mesh_docs and was not found, while a proposal in repo markdown was invisible to search entirely.

Decisions taken (2026-08-22)

Question Decision
What should noxflow become? Decompose into hal/* modules; noxflow returns to tasks/workflows
Who owns agent identity? hal/agents — a mesh concept, alongside nodes
Where do third-party apps live? Out of this repo. They run on the mesh; they are not of it
Knowledge structure Modelled on papa-hq; implementation choice left open

Open questions

Tracked in analysis.md under "Open questions".