jschoubben
8d772ad40c
The lead answered the four open questions against hq's principles on 2026-11-11: the vault serves licence secrets to the tool runner's account (principle 6), the operator's word replaces ADR 0183 §21 and ADR 0206 §16, §18 with no record, the store database stays one milestone as the carry-over's read-only source (principle 7, the delivery gap named), and the milestone no longer waits for design 47's G: its conditions are said on the operator channel as any module does today. Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01NcbgfHb9d4T9nq5Q6WqdiJ
03-DESIGN
The authoritative specification. Implementation is built against what is written here.
Two layers
| Folder | What it is |
|---|---|
00-as-is/ |
The mesh that exists today. Shipped behaviour, described as it is — including behaviour nobody would choose again. |
01-to-be/ |
The mesh being built toward. Every statement traceable to a decision record in the knowledge base (ADR 0290). |
They are never mixed. A statement about the future does not belong in an as-is document, and an as-is document is never edited to describe an intention.
When a to-be design ships, it does not move. Its as-is counterpart is written or updated,
the to-be document's status becomes implemented, and both stand — one describing what runs,
the other recording what was intended. Deleting the intention loses the reasoning, which is
the expensive half.
Frontmatter
Every design document (not the READMEs) carries:
---
layer: as-is | to-be
status: designed | in-progress | implemented | abandoned
code: [] # owning code repo(s), from 00-META/repos.md
updated: YYYY-MM-DD # date of the last status change, not of text edits
decisions: [] # the decision records this document rests on, each "ADR NNNN"
---
For an as-is document, status: implemented is the normal state — it describes something that
runs — and code: names where that implementation lives.
Status changes when implementation state changes, never because design text was edited. An
implemented claim must be defensible from the owning repository's main branch, not from
intent. If it cannot be checked, it is in-progress.
Cross-cutting views are generated from this frontmatter by the hq-status skill and never
written to disk.
What belongs here
Functional analysis, architectural description, and specification — prose and diagrams only, no code. A manifest field may be named; a manifest may not be pasted. A document enters the to-be layer only after the decision behind it is recorded in the knowledge base and the research that produced it is closed.
Subfolders are encouraged where a layer grows enough to need them.