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hq/.claude/skills/hal-new-research/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

1.5 KiB

name, description
name description
hal-new-research Use when starting a new research effort in HQ — an idea, technology or approach worth investigating before it is committed to design. Triggers on "research X", "investigate X", "spike X", "should we use X", "is X worth doing".

hal-new-research

Scaffolds a new research effort. Authoritative playbook: 00-META/process/01-research.md — read it; this skill only does the mechanical setup.

Steps

  1. Find the next free number: list 01-RESEARCH/NNN-*, take the highest plus one, zero-padded to three digits.

  2. Create 01-RESEARCH/NNN-descriptive-name/ (kebab-case from the topic).

  3. Create 00-overview.md in it with exactly this frontmatter, then a prose summary of what is being investigated, why, and what it touches:

    ---
    status: active
    initiated: YYYY-MM-DD
    touches: []
    became: []
    ---
    
  4. Do the research in further documents in the same folder. Keep the summary current.

Do not

  • Do not restate the status in prose. It lives in frontmatter, in one place.
  • Do not fill became: while the effort is open — hal-graduate sets it at closure.
  • Do not skip or reuse a sequence number.
  • Do not write into 03-DESIGN from an open effort.
  • Do not name the mesh being observed. Evidence is required; identification is forbidden.

Closing

An effort never just stops. It closes through hal-graduate as graduated or abandoned, always with became: pointing at what it turned into. Nothing is deleted.