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hq/.claude/skills/hal-diagnose/SKILL.md
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jschoubben 87f4f29cc6 Novox Mesh, Nox, and HQ becomes company-scoped
ADR 0027 — the product is Novox Mesh, shortened to mesh internally. HAL was
never chosen: it arrived with the dotfiles repository this grew out of, it
is borrowed, and it is borrowed from the canonical untrustworthy machine
intelligence, which is an odd flag for infrastructure trusted with
credentials. Timing is the substance of the decision, not an aside — the
skeleton is not built, so renaming costs a search and replace now and a
migration later.

Nox is an identity of Novox, and specifically the agent of the MESH rather
than of a node. Nodes keep their own identities. Nox addresses them, and a
human mostly talks to Nox — which makes it the concrete form of the
mission's vision: state an intent, and the mesh works out which node holds
the thing. It holds no private channel. The gap this opens is recorded:
ADR 0012 binds every agent to a home node, and a mesh-scoped agent has
none, so the model needs extending.

ADR 0028 — HQ is company-scoped, novox/hq, with the mesh as its first
product. Checked rather than assumed: the company organisation already
holds live projects that the mesh builds and deploys, so they are tenants
rather than peers, and the mesh is the ground they stand on. There is also
company work outside the mesh already, which strengthens the case and means
the eventual split is closer than "some day" — so each document's scope is
fixed now, in a table, making that split mechanical instead of
archaeological. The folders are deliberately not restructured yet.

The skeleton takes the new vocabulary: mesh-host, mesh-substrate,
mesh-control, mesh-surfaces, mesh-catalog. Substrate drops to four services
now that identity is a hosted workload rather than a dependency.

Research 009 opens the migration, with the reframing that lowers its risk:
replace the control plane, do not move the workloads. Their data never
moves, so it is re-declared rather than adopted — which keeps adoption out
of scope, as the lab design requires. Self-hosting is the last phase, or a
failed cutover takes away the means to fix it.
2026-08-23 21:20:35 +02:00

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---
name: hal-diagnose
description: Use when investigating an open HQ issue — finding which component owns a symptom, and why. Triggers on "diagnose issue N", "where does this live", "who owns this bug", "why does this happen".
---
# hal-diagnose
Investigates an open issue to the point where its owner is known. **Authoritative playbook:**
[`00-META/process/03-issues.md`](../../../00-META/process/03-issues.md).
## Before forming a hypothesis
**Search the operational memory for the literal symptom text.** Not after a hypothesis fails —
before forming one. The knowledge base is indexed on symptoms, and the entry needed is usually
titled after the error being stared at.
This fires hardest on familiar ground, where a confident trail feels like progress. Two entries
have been rediscovered from scratch over several hours in one session because the search was
skipped. Both were already written down.
If the search returns nothing and the problem is then solved, write the finding back. An empty
result is not "nothing to learn" — it is the reason the next person repeats the work.
## Steps
1. Read `00-report.md`. Move `status:` to `diagnosing`.
2. Investigate. Write `01-diagnosis.md` in the same folder: the trail, **dated**, including
what was ruled out and how. Archaeology — which commit, which pull request, which date a
behaviour changed — is the most valuable content here.
3. When the owner is known, set `status: located` and fill `located-in:` with repositories or
modules from [`00-META/repos.md`](../../../00-META/repos.md).
4. On resolution: `status: resolved`, fill `fixed-by:`. If the root cause was a design gap, run
`hal-graduate` for the amendment and fill `amended-design:`.
## Rules
- State evidence, not assertion. A date and a reference outrank a conclusion.
- Record what was ruled out. The next person needs to know where not to look.
- Closed issues are never deleted.
- `wontfix` is legitimate and requires a sentence saying why.