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.
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status, initiated, touches, became
| status | initiated | touches | became | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| active | 2026-08-22 |
|
|
001 — Module domain decomposition
- Initiated by: jochen, 2026-08-22
- Areas touched: every
hal/*andnoxflow/*module; the pipeline's dependency graph; the knowledge base; agent identity and credentials.
Summary
HAL has 124 modules. That number is not a maintenance problem in itself — it is the symptom of missing bounded contexts. Modules are split not because they model different domains, but because splitting is the only lever the platform offers:
- no way to run one daemon on one node without making it a module
(
hal/claude-licences— one daemon, single-node) - no way to expose two of a kind from one module
- no namespace separating the mesh from the software it runs
This effort establishes the current state, the ideal state, and the sequence between them.
Trigger
A night of debugging that produced four fixes and one conclusion. Every fault was a boundary fault:
- Per-agent Claude credentials had to be written by the noxflow runtime, because
agents.claude_accountis in noxflow's database — even though agent identity is a mesh concept and node identity already lives in the mesh registry. - Whether
hal/brainmay depend on noxflow took three attempts to answer, twice wrongly, because the ownership boundary was never stated. - Authoritative documentation existed in
mesh_docsand was not found, while a proposal in repo markdown was invisible to search entirely.
Decisions taken (2026-08-22)
| Question | Decision |
|---|---|
| What should noxflow become? | Decompose into hal/* modules; noxflow returns to tasks/workflows |
| Who owns agent identity? | hal/agents — a mesh concept, alongside nodes |
| Where do third-party apps live? | Out of this repo. They run on the mesh; they are not of it |
| Knowledge structure | Modelled on papa-hq; implementation choice left open |
Open questions
Tracked in analysis.md under "Open questions".
Deliberately not decided
Recorded so they are not mistaken for oversights. Each is open, and each comes out of
ADR 0001; this effort stays
active until they are answered.
| Question | Status |
|---|---|
hal/scheduler — infrastructure, or part of the work context. |
Open. |
| Which context owns the executor. | Open. |
| Catalogue destination — one repository or many. | Open. Phase 4. |
| What the shared library keeps after extraction. | Open. Phase 3. |
| Where human agent modality is recorded — which user, on which node, a human agent acts as. | Open. Required by the model; not yet stored. |
| Which domains the modules outside the platform core group into. | Open, from ADR 0009, which settles the principle and deliberately not the list. |