jschoubben
346e613995
Measured: the host is a binary somebody copied to four machines, owned by no package and built by nothing, while the controller, catalogue, builder and vault are container images publishing no ports at all. Same language, same project, same kind of work, delivered two ways — and the difference is not a judgement about either, it is that images are the only delivery that works. What it costs: genesis must raise a container runtime before the control plane can exist; updating the control plane goes through a registry the control plane runs; a host change cannot be rolled out at all; and compiling the language the mesh is written in is not a capability of the builder, so the controller is built from a hand-written Dockerfile — the incantation the bundle toolchain exists to abolish. Third-party software stays a container: the store, the registry, the broker are somebody else's build. The container runtime stays on the machine for modules. What changes is that the control plane no longer needs it to exist. The receiving half is already built and tested (ADR 0141). Staged: compile Go, an artifact names its target, deliver a binary, the host first, then the rest, genesis last.
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.