jschoubben
87f4f29cc6
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.
02-DECISIONS
Architecture decision records — the "why" trail behind the rules in
00-META and the specifications in 03-DESIGN.
Numbered 02 because a decision precedes the design it authorises. Research concludes,
the decision is recorded here, and only then is the design written. Following the folder
numbers walks the process in the order it happens.
One file per decision, numbered, never deleted. A superseded record has its status: changed
and gains a pointer to what replaced it — its text is never edited. The reasoning that was
rejected is the expensive half to rediscover.
The records run in the order the decisions were taken, oldest first.
Every decision is a record. There is no ledger and no index file — if a decision is worth
recording it is worth a record, and if it is not worth a record it is not recorded
(ADR 0026). A "decision" small enough to be one line is
almost always a rule, and a rule belongs in
00-META/how-we-build.md, where it is enforced and keeps the
incident that earned it.
Frontmatter
---
status: proposed | accepted | superseded
date: YYYY-MM-DD # when the decision was taken, not when it was written down
deciders: name
reconstructed: true|false # true when the record was written after the fact from evidence
superseded-by: # 02-DECISIONS/NNNN-....md, when status is superseded
extends: # 02-DECISIONS/NNNN-....md, when this record widens an earlier one
---
Body
# N. Title in plain language
## Context what was true, with evidence
## Considered Options numbered, each with why it was rejected
## Decision what was decided
## Consequences what follows, including what got harder
## References commits, pull requests, knowledge-base entries, prior art
State evidence, not assertion. "Zero of 124 modules declare brain as a dependency"
outranks "the dependency rule is not followed".
Reconstructed records
Records 0001–0014 were written on 2026-08-23, after the decisions they describe. Records 0015 onward were taken as records. Those
decisions were taken in implementation rather than in a document; the records state what was
decided and the evidence it was decided from, and each carries reconstructed: true and says
so in its first lines.
A reconstructed record is not a transcript. Where the deliberation is not recoverable, the options section states what the alternatives were and why the chosen one won on the evidence available — not a discussion that did not happen. Where a date is not establishable it says so rather than guessing.
Index
The index is generated, not maintained — run the hal-status skill, which reads the
frontmatter of every record. A hand-written index drifts from the folder it describes, and
this one had already done so after a single addition.