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.
3.4 KiB
layer, status, code, updated, decisions
| layer | status | code | updated | decisions | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| as-is | implemented |
|
2026-08-23 |
Knowledge
The mesh keeps two knowledge stores. They are not redundant, and knowing which is which is the difference between finding an answer in one search and rediscovering it over several hours.
The operational memory
A store of operational notes, written and read by whoever — human or agent — is working. Each note is a slug and a body: how something works, what went wrong, what the fix was, what assumption turned out to be false.
It is indexed on symptoms. The entry someone needs is usually titled after the error they are staring at, which is why the standing instruction is to search the literal error text before forming a hypothesis rather than after one fails.
Its content is overwhelmingly the record of previous debugging: a large body of troubleshooting entries, module conventions, and standing notes about work that is open. It is the mesh's institutional memory of what has already gone wrong.
The cost of skipping it is documented in the mesh's own record: entries have been rediscovered from scratch, over hours, in sessions where the search was skipped because the trail felt confident. It fires hardest on familiar ground, not unfamiliar ground.
The structured archive
A second store, structured rather than flat: spaces, pages, revisions, tiers, and full-text search. Where the operational memory is a note, this is a document with an owner and a lifecycle.
Content is promoted through tiers — private, then team, then platform — with a librarian agent owning approval and promotion at the boundary. Proposals to edit are reviewed rather than applied.
This is where the mesh's governed documents live, including the constitution injected into design sessions (ADR 0009).
Why both
The distinction is by lifecycle, not by subject.
| Operational memory | Structured archive |
|---|---|
| Written the moment something is learned | Written deliberately, reviewed |
| Flat, symptom-indexed | Structured, tiered, owned |
| Anyone writes; nothing approves | Promotion is approved |
| Truth is "this happened" | Truth is "this is agreed" |
Collapsing them would cost one of the two properties: either every hard-won note waits for review, or governed documents can be changed by anyone mid-incident.
Where this repository sits
This repository is a third thing, and the objection was raised when it was created: a fourth knowledge system repeats the mistake the split was made to fix.
The answer given was indexing, not location — that these documents are indexed into the knowledge base so that a symptom search returns them alongside everything else. One source, many surfaces.
That indexing does not currently exist. A search for this repository's content returns nothing. The claim is load-bearing for the decision to separate the repository at all, and until it is true, this repository is exactly the fourth knowledge system the objection described. Recorded here rather than in the ledger, because it is a statement about how the mesh's knowledge actually works today.
The librarian
A single agent owns the archive's approvals and promotions. Its approval capabilities have at times not been reachable as tools, which does not affect the operational memory but does mean promotion stops silently — the store keeps accepting proposals that nothing can approve.