jschoubben
333356cff3
Jochen asked whether the order made sense. It did not -- it followed when things happened to be decided, which after consolidation is fictional anyway since record 5 alone folds decisions taken across a week. Concretely wrong before: the domain statement sat at 8, after five engineering rules; the constitution was scattered across 5, 12 and 17; the tiers landed at 15, 16, 21 and 22 with process records in between. Now it walks: what the mesh is (1-3), its tiers from the bottom up (4-8), what runs on them and how it gets there (9-10), how it is built (11-16), how it is checked (17-18), how we work (19-23). Two things made this safe rather than free. It is a permutation, not a compaction, so the renames go through temporary names -- otherwise two files want one slot and one is lost. And the reference rewrite is a single simultaneous pass, because almost every number moved into a slot another number was vacating; replacing one at a time would have cascaded and pointed things at the wrong record while still resolving. Verified: 284 [ADR NNNN](path) links across the repository, all with matching text and target. The ordering principle is now stated in 19 rather than left implicit -- the repository already said "the numbering is the flow" about its folders, and there was no reason for the records to be the exception.
79 lines
3.5 KiB
Markdown
79 lines
3.5 KiB
Markdown
---
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layer: as-is
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status: implemented
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code: [hal]
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updated: 2026-08-23
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decisions: []
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---
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# Knowledge
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The mesh keeps two knowledge stores. They are not redundant, and knowing which is which is the
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difference between finding an answer in one search and rediscovering it over several hours.
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## The operational memory
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A store of operational notes, written and read by whoever — human or agent — is working. Each
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note is a slug and a body: how something works, what went wrong, what the fix was, what
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assumption turned out to be false.
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It is indexed on **symptoms**. The entry someone needs is usually titled after the error they
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are staring at, which is why the standing instruction is to search the literal error text
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before forming a hypothesis rather than after one fails.
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Its content is overwhelmingly the record of previous debugging: a large body of
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troubleshooting entries, module conventions, and standing notes about work that is open. It is
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the mesh's institutional memory of *what has already gone wrong*.
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The cost of skipping it is documented in the mesh's own record: entries have been rediscovered
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from scratch, over hours, in sessions where the search was skipped because the trail felt
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confident. It fires hardest on familiar ground, not unfamiliar ground.
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## The structured archive
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A second store, structured rather than flat: spaces, pages, revisions, tiers, and full-text
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search. Where the operational memory is a note, this is a document with an owner and a
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lifecycle.
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Content is promoted through tiers — private, then team, then platform — with a librarian agent
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owning approval and promotion at the boundary. Proposals to edit are reviewed rather than
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applied.
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This is where the mesh's **governed** documents live, including the constitution injected into
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design sessions ([ADR 0020](../../02-DECISIONS/0020-the-mesh-is-governed-by-a-constitution.md)).
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## Why both
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The distinction is by lifecycle, not by subject.
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| Operational memory | Structured archive |
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|---|---|
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| Written the moment something is learned | Written deliberately, reviewed |
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| Flat, symptom-indexed | Structured, tiered, owned |
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| Anyone writes; nothing approves | Promotion is approved |
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| Truth is "this happened" | Truth is "this is agreed" |
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Collapsing them would cost one of the two properties: either every hard-won note waits for
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review, or governed documents can be changed by anyone mid-incident.
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## Where this repository sits
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This repository is a third thing, and the objection was raised when it was created: a fourth
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knowledge system repeats the mistake the split was made to fix.
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The answer given was **indexing, not location** — that these documents are indexed into the
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knowledge base so that a symptom search returns them alongside everything else. One source,
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many surfaces.
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**That indexing does not currently exist.** A search for this repository's content returns
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nothing. The claim is load-bearing for the decision to separate the repository at all, and
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until it is true, this repository is exactly the fourth knowledge system the objection
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described. Recorded here because it is a statement about how the mesh's knowledge actually
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works today, and as [`04-ISSUES/006`](../../04-ISSUES/006-hq-is-not-indexed-into-the-knowledge-base/00-report.md).
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## The librarian
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A single agent owns the archive's approvals and promotions. Its approval capabilities have at
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times not been reachable as tools, which does not affect the operational memory but does mean
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promotion stops silently — the store keeps accepting proposals that nothing can approve.
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