jschoubben
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The architecture 0117 opened needs a module to offer a service as a role on the bus — one holder, addressed by what it does. A closed table in the controller cannot express that: a capability a module contributes would require changing the mesh itself. But 0110 closed the set for a good reason — nothing could say what seats a mesh had, and the hand count came out at eleven of thirteen. That argues for enumerable, not hardcoded, and 0110 weighed free-form against a fixed table without considering a third option: closed at any moment and derived from the catalogue. A derived list cannot drift, which is how the count broke. So: the mesh's seats stay the mesh's, reserved by the mesh- prefix so the prefix is the rule and there is no list to maintain; ten seats are renamed to restore 0079's convention; everything 0110 decided about what a seat IS survives untouched. Design 29 carries the declaration model: three namespaces, subjects derived from local names so a manifest survives the wire changing, queues never declared, five relationships (the job and state shapes 0041 had no room for), and the build-publish-deploy lifecycle with hard, soft and build-time dependencies distinguished. 0041 gets a progressive insight: "no per-consumer setup, only a subscription" was a fact about a topic exchange, and a JetStream durable consumer is a real object someone creates. WBS 1.3/1.4 were wrong and say so: streams come at registration and consumers at assignment, so only the foundation set belongs at genesis.
00-META
The northern star. What the mesh is, the environment it runs in, and what changes when it works — plus the engineering practice that holds across everything Novox builds. Every research effort and design decision is checked against this folder.
| File / folder | Purpose |
|---|---|
mission.md |
Vision, mission, and the values that decide arguments |
context.md |
The environment — conditions, not aspirations |
effect.md |
What is different when the work is done |
how-we-build.md |
The rules that hold across the mesh, each one earned. The source of the mesh constitution — the governed page the mesh injects into design sessions is derived from it. |
glossary.md |
One name per thing — the authority on vocabulary, and the words that were retired |
repos.md |
Where implementation lives, and what each repository owns |
process/ |
The playbooks — how work moves through this repository, for engineers and agents alike |
Rules
- Markdown only.
- Stable by nature. Changes here reflect a genuine shift in intent, not iteration. The one
exception is
how-we-build.md, which changes whenever a rule is earned — and only through its amendment process. - Research and design must be traceable back to what is written here.
- Instance-agnostic. These documents describe the mesh as a concept. No machine names, no counts, no topology.
On the architecture overview in the code repository
The code repository carries an architecture overview predating this folder. It is a useful
description of how the mesh works, and its content now lives — anonymised and checked against
the implementation — in 03-DESIGN/00-as-is/. GENESIS answers why;
that document answered how, which is the design layer's job.
It had also drifted from the implementation in ways worth recording, since both were found by comparing it against the code rather than by anyone noticing:
- It described the pipeline as having a separate builder process and a build stage that packages. Neither was true after 2026-08-04; the documents stayed stale until 2026-08-06 (ADR 0010).
- It listed the mesh as spanning a fixed number of named machines, which is exactly the content this repository cannot carry.
It also lists "symlinks, not copies" as a key design principle, and that is a genuine contradiction rather than a stale detail. The mesh's stated intent is that it creates no symlinks at all — the rule is not merely "only the installer may link", and a founding document elevating linking to a principle points the opposite way from where this is going.
What exists today is that the installer owns and reconciles every link
(ADR 0012) — an as-is fact, recorded in
03-DESIGN/00-as-is/05-runtime-and-installation.md.
Centralising who may link narrowed the incident class; it did not close it. The intent is to
remove the mechanism, recorded as ADR 0012.
A founding document contradicting the direction of travel is precisely the failure this folder exists to prevent.