jochen
a11da86591
Issue 116 found the mesh's proxy applies nothing to a request — host lookup, forward. Against what the replaced ingress actually relies on, four capabilities are missing: authentication (three dependents, each gating an admin surface with no login of its own), refusal scoped to a path (one, a live incident mitigation), path-scoped routing with priority, and redirect. Policy goes on the route rather than beside it. A proxy-side settings layer keyed by route name would keep the grant literally clean, but then "what protects this route" is answered from two files nothing keeps in step — and a route's protection is part of what a route is. The set is closed at those four, so a fifth is an amendment and each addition is earned by a dependent that exists. An open middleware surface was rejected: it recreates what is being replaced, and narrowing one later is far harder than widening a closed one. Where policy needs a credential the declaration names a secret and never carries the value, which keeps the existing secret machinery the only thing holding credentials. Inlining a hash was rejected as the first credential in a declaration — a precedent easier to set than withdraw. This re-keys the routing table by host and path with priority, which follows from the decision rather than being a separate one: two of the four need one host routed more than one way. Equal priorities must resolve identically every time or the proxy stops being reproducible. The record says how it is checked, including the negative case that rots quietly — a declaration carrying a credential value rather than a reference must be refused, so the rejected option cannot return by accident. 08-connectivity §3 names the record and gains the subsection; issue 116 gains amended-design.
03-DESIGN
The authoritative specification. Implementation is built against what is written here.
Two layers
| Folder | What it is |
|---|---|
00-as-is/ |
The mesh that exists today. Shipped behaviour, described as it is — including behaviour nobody would choose again. |
01-to-be/ |
The mesh being built toward. Every statement traceable to a record in 02-DECISIONS/. |
They are never mixed. A statement about the future does not belong in an as-is document, and an as-is document is never edited to describe an intention.
When a to-be design ships, it does not move. Its as-is counterpart is written or updated,
the to-be document's status becomes implemented, and both stand — one describing what runs,
the other recording what was intended. Deleting the intention loses the reasoning, which is
the expensive half.
Frontmatter
Every design document (not the READMEs) carries:
---
layer: as-is | to-be
status: designed | in-progress | implemented | abandoned
code: [] # owning code repo(s), from 00-META/repos.md
updated: YYYY-MM-DD # date of the last status change, not of text edits
decisions: [] # 02-DECISIONS/ records this document rests on
---
For an as-is document, status: implemented is the normal state — it describes something that
runs — and code: names where that implementation lives.
Status changes when implementation state changes, never because design text was edited. An
implemented claim must be defensible from the owning repository's main branch, not from
intent. If it cannot be checked, it is in-progress.
Cross-cutting views are generated from this frontmatter by the hq-status skill and never
written to disk.
What belongs here
Functional analysis, architectural description, and specification — prose and diagrams
only, no code. A manifest field may be named; a manifest may not be pasted. A document
enters the to-be layer only after the decision behind it is recorded in 02-DECISIONS/
and the research that produced it is closed.
Subfolders are encouraged where a layer grows enough to need them.