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.
90 lines
4.9 KiB
Markdown
90 lines
4.9 KiB
Markdown
---
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status: accepted
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date: 2026-08-23
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deciders: jochen
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reconstructed: false
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---
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# 28. HQ is company-scoped; the mesh is its first product
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## Context
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This repository was `hal-hq` — one product's headquarters, named for the product. Then the
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product was renamed ([ADR 0027](0027-the-product-is-novox-mesh.md)), which forced the question
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of what the repository is actually the headquarters *of*.
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Two facts settled it, and both were checked rather than assumed.
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**Novox already delivers other things.** The company's forge organisation holds live projects
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beside the mesh, and they are registered as build sources — meaning the mesh already builds and
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deploys them. They are not hypothetical future products; they exist and ship today.
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**They are tenants, not peers.** They run *on* the mesh. Every one of them is developed,
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delivered and hosted by it. So the mesh is not one product among several — it is the ground the
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others stand on.
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That distinction decides the scope. If the mesh were a product beside others, a per-product HQ
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would be right. Because it is the substrate the company operates on, a decision about the mesh
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is a decision about how the company works.
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## Considered options
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1. **`mesh-hq` — one HQ per product.** The safe choice, and the reversible one: a second
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product creates its own HQ and shared practice graduates upward later. Rejected, knowingly,
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because it models the mesh as a peer of things that are actually its tenants.
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2. **A company HQ *and* a product HQ, from the start.** Rejected as ceremony — two repositories
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for one operator, and the constitution's own YAGNI rule says not to.
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3. **One company-scoped HQ, `novox/hq`, with the mesh as its first product.** Chosen.
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## Decision
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The repository is **`novox/hq`** — Novox's headquarters, not the mesh's.
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It holds the reasoning behind what Novox builds. Today almost all of that is the mesh, because
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the mesh is what Novox is building. That is a fact about the present, not a definition of the
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repository.
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**The scope of each document is fixed now, so the eventual split is mechanical rather than
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archaeological:**
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| Scope | Documents | Moves if products separate? |
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|---|---|---|
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| **Company** | [`how-we-build.md`](../00-META/how-we-build.md), [`process/`](../00-META/process/), [`repos.md`](../00-META/repos.md), this record and [0019](0019-hq-is-its-own-repository.md)–[0027](0027-the-product-is-novox-mesh.md) | No — they stay at the top |
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| **Product (mesh)** | [`mission.md`](../00-META/mission.md), [`context.md`](../00-META/context.md), [`effect.md`](../00-META/effect.md), `01-RESEARCH`, `03-DESIGN`, `04-ISSUES`, records 0001–0018 | Yes — into a product section |
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The folders are **not** restructured now. One product's content under a company name is
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correct while there is one product's worth of it, and nesting before there is anything to nest
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is the ceremony option 2 was rejected for.
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## Consequences
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- Engineering practice has a home that does not belong to the mesh. `how-we-build.md` — never
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write to production directly, migrations for schema changes, runtime evidence for behavioural
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criteria — is true of any Novox project, and its being in a mesh repository was always a
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slight mislabelling.
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- The constitution derived from it ([ADR 0025](0025-hq-is-the-source-of-the-constitution.md))
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can legitimately govern work outside the mesh. Under a product HQ it could not have, without
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either duplicating or reaching across repositories.
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- **The bet is not entirely forward-looking, and that is worth being honest about.** Novox
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already has work that is *not* a mesh tenant — client engagements and at least one product
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that is developed outside it. So the company genuinely has a scope wider than the mesh
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**today**, which strengthens the case for a company HQ and simultaneously means the split in
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the table above is closer than "some day". The table is not a precaution; it is a plan whose
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trigger already half-exists.
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- What has *not* happened yet is any of that work needing the constitution. That is the actual
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trigger ([ADR 0025](0025-hq-is-the-source-of-the-constitution.md)): the moment something
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outside the mesh must be governed by the same rules, product-level content moves down a level
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and this repository becomes what its name already claims.
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- A new repository was created rather than the old one transferred — the forge predates the
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transfer API. `jschoubben/hq` is left in place untouched; it is not the source of truth and
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nothing points at it.
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- The mesh's own documents now live one conceptual level below the repository they are in. A
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reader arriving at `01-RESEARCH` should understand it as the mesh's research, not Novox's.
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Nothing in the folder names says so, and that is the cost of not restructuring.
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## References
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- [ADR 0027](0027-the-product-is-novox-mesh.md) — the product name that forced the question.
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- [ADR 0019](0019-hq-is-its-own-repository.md) — why HQ is a repository at all. Unchanged; only
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its scope moves.
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