jschoubben
a2495e4d8e
how-we-build 5 already says that if a document states a rule about the mesh, it says how the rule is verified — an unenforced rule being indistinguishable from a wrong one, and costing more because people believe it. That has never been applied to decisions, and a decision record states the same kind of claim. The gap was found by review: the lab reached 2,128 lines with 1,072 untested and no stated rule broken, because there is no testing posture in how-we-build at all. Every decision the lab embodies was verified by hand and none of it survives the terminal it ran in — which is 04-ISSUES/005 in miniature, coverage assumed rather than checked. Rejected a coverage percentage: it measures how much code a test touched, not whether anything important is defended, and would have been satisfied by testing the parser harder while the hypervisor integration stayed unasserted. Rejected test-driven development as a hard rule, and not because it is wrong in general. Half this implementation was discovery — that the hypervisor CLI reads a definition from stdin and hangs, that it assigns a MAC without recording it, that a stock image's networking flushes a static address. A test written first against undiscovered behaviour asserts a guess. So: structure and logic tested first, behaviour against a real system tested alongside, mocking the boundary forbidden, and a blocking gate as the definition of done. A test names the decision it defends, which is what makes the pairing checkable — a decision without one can be found rather than noticed. Stated as proposed rather than adopted: 6 requires review by someone who is not the proposer. Records 0001-0033 predate it and are not retroactively invalid, but each should acquire a test or an explicit note that it cannot have one, and until then the rule is aspirational for them — which is the state 5 warns about, recorded rather than hidden.
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 A superseded record has its status: changed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 hq-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.