Three corrections, two of them to things I wrote today. 026 is the serious one. Four modules mounted fourteen host paths nothing declared — the mail spool, the databases, the object store's data. The runtime creates those as root, so owner and mode go unapplied, and the rule that keeps a directory holding data the mesh did not put there is written in terms of declared directories. It reached the configuration and missed the data. The cause was carrying compose files across: a container shape that can express one gets filled in like one. 025 claimed nothing turns a tag into a digest. That is false, and the answer was designed and built before I wrote it. A module names an artifact, not an image, and `kind: upstream` mirrors somebody else's image into the mesh's own registry, pinned by the digest it lands with. The two-document split the issue described as the shape of a fix is the design. Pinning twelve images by hand was treating the symptom, and left them pointing at a public registry rather than the mesh's. And the image store was written up as something the mesh does. It is an ordinary module — considered for the substrate and removed, because the test is whether the control plane needs it before its first instruction, not whether it can grant itself one. So somebody's own registry is the same module as the mesh's.
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 record in 02-DECISIONS/. |
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: [] # 02-DECISIONS/ records this document rests on
---
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 02-DECISIONS/
and the research that produced it is closed.
Subfolders are encouraged where a layer grows enough to need them.