jschoubben
9d091c81e0
Three things from walking a real dev cycle through 0063, all of which Jochen caught by pushing on where I had glossed. 0064 -- a build edge is a third kind. Research 011 established presence and instantiation, and both are RUNTIME edges: they answer what a module needs in order to run. Delivery needs a different question -- what has to be rebuilt when this changes -- and that relationship is fixed inside an artifact rather than negotiated when it runs. So the graph as designed could not drive delivery, which is the real reason 0063 was not approvable. It is derived rather than declared, read from what a module actually imports, because a declared list and the imports it describes drift and the imports are the true ones. The runtime edges stay declared, and that asymmetry is not an inconsistency: a runtime edge is an intention somebody has, a build edge is a fact about code that exists. It also makes design quality measurable. A module with many inbound build edges is one whose every change is expensive, and the current shared library is exactly that -- nobody could see it because nothing drew the edges. 0065 -- the core library is the mesh's domain. Jochen disagreed with 0030's "types, not behaviour" and was right: that guard is aimed at the wrong thing. A library everything depends on is a hub whether it holds types or code, and the fan-in is what makes a change expensive. So types ship with the module that owns them -- trading one wide edge for several narrow ones -- and the core library holds what is true of the mesh regardless of context, which research 011 already found: a module, a node, an assignment. The test is "would this still mean the same thing in a context that had never heard of the one it came from". A node does; a pipeline stage does not. Domain-driven is the point rather than the label: "who else might want this" always answers yes, which is how the current one grew. And it changes the check for the better. "The build output contains no runtime code" would have enforced a rule now withdrawn. Inbound build edges is a measurement rather than a prohibition, and it is visible while a hub is forming rather than after. 0063 revised on both counts, plus a third: I had written "the lab judges it" as though that were a step. A lab run takes tens of seconds, occupies a VM, and fails for environmental reasons -- and a shared-library change produces dozens. One expensive non-deterministic gate fails both ways, and neither failure looks like itself. Verdicts are now tiered, and a run that failed environmentally is explicitly not a verdict. 0063 also now carries what must exist before it can be implemented, rather than leaving that to be discovered.
Novox HQ
The single source of truth for what Novox builds — what it is, what it is becoming,
and why. Today that is almost entirely Novox Mesh, the substrate everything else runs on. Implementation lives in modules/; the reasoning behind it lives here.
Structure
| Folder | Purpose |
|---|---|
00-META |
Mission, foundational context, the rules that hold across the mesh, the repository map, and the process playbooks. The northern star for every decision. |
01-RESEARCH |
Active and historical investigations, before they harden into design. |
02-DECISIONS |
Numbered decision records, in the order the decisions were taken — what was chosen, and what was rejected. |
03-DESIGN |
The authoritative specification, in two layers: 00-as-is — the mesh that exists — and 01-to-be — the one being built toward. |
04-ISSUES |
The front door for "something is wrong" at the level of design or governance. |
The numbering is the flow. Research produces a decision; the decision authorises a design.
That is why decisions are 02 and design is 03 — a reader following the numbers walks the
process in the order it happens.
The flow
idea ──► 01-RESEARCH ──► decision (02-DECISIONS/) ──► 03-DESIGN/01-to-be ──► built (code repo)
│ │ │
│ │ └─► 03-DESIGN/00-as-is once shipped
│ └────► abandoned (recorded, kept)
└─(small/obvious, still recorded in 02-DECISIONS)──────────► 03-DESIGN directly
symptom ──► 04-ISSUES ──► diagnosis ──► code-repo fix and/or design amendment
00-META/how-we-build.md ──► sync ──► the constitution the mesh injects into design sessions
Implementation lives in the code repositories — see
00-META/repos.md. Every workflow is a playbook in
00-META/process/; agents operate through them and not outside them.
Rules
- Markdown only.
- No new top-level folders without explicit confirmation.
- Knowledge flows
GENESIS → RESEARCH → DESIGN. Research graduates into design only after analysis against GENESIS confirms alignment, and only through a recorded decision. - Status lives in frontmatter, never in a central status file. Cross-cutting views are generated on demand, never hand-maintained.
- GENESIS and DESIGN are instance-agnostic. They describe the mesh as a concept — no machine names, no counts, no topology. A reader must not be able to tell how many nodes the author happened to have.
- RESEARCH describes real observations, but never identifies the mesh it observed. Evidence is what makes research worth reading, and the shape of a finding survives anonymisation intact — a node publicly named but behind a household NAT carries the whole lesson without naming anything.
- The as-is layer records what is, not what should be — including behaviour nobody would choose again. A layer that keeps only the good decisions is a brochure.
- A document that states a rule about the mesh should say how that rule is checked. This repository has a rule requiring every capability-exposing module to declare the core runtime as a dependency; zero modules do. An unenforced rule is indistinguishable from a wrong one.
This repository is public
Written for a reader who is not its author and has no access to the mesh it describes. Concretely, nothing here may contain:
- routable addresses, real domain names, hosting providers, or node names — use the
documentation ranges (RFC 5737
203.0.113.0/24, RFC 1918) and role names such asanchor,home-server,workstation,laptop - absolute paths from anyone's machine, usernames, home directories, or email addresses
- credentials in any form, including lengths or hashes of live secrets
- operational detail that is only useful to an attacker — which host is the VPN hub, on which port, which node is reachable only through a forwarded port
Private-range addresses and the overlay plan are fine: they describe a pattern, not a target.
The test is whether a paragraph would still teach something to a stranger running an entirely different mesh. If it would, it belongs. If it only makes sense to someone who knows this particular installation, it is either a note in the wrong place or a disclosure.
Why this is its own repository
It began inside the code repository, on the reasoning that the mesh already has a mesh-native knowledge store and that adding a fourth knowledge system would repeat the mistake this folder was created to fix.
That objection was about a fourth knowledge system, and the answer offered was indexing rather than location — that these documents would be indexed into the knowledge base, so a symptom search returns them beside everything else. One source, many surfaces. Where the source is authored is then a separate question.
That indexing does not exist. It was checked on 2026-08-23 and returns nothing; it appears
never to have existed. Until it does, the objection stands unanswered and this repository is
the fourth knowledge system it was argued not to be. Recorded as
04-ISSUES/006, and
left standing here rather than quietly reworded, because a claim that held up a decision and
was never checked is precisely the failure this repository exists to name.
Answered separately, a repository of its own is the better home:
- The cadence is different. A decision changes when thinking changes, not when code changes. Tying documents to a code branch means they merge on the code's schedule.
- The reviewers are different. A design argument is not reviewed the way an implementation is, and it should not queue behind a build.
- The scope is wider than one repository. ADR 0015 sends most modules out of the monorepo entirely. Documentation that governs several repositories cannot live inside one of them.
The trade is real and worth naming: a change to a document and the change to the code it
describes can no longer land in one commit. Keeping them honest is a discipline now rather
than a mechanism — which is why every decision is recorded in
02-DECISIONS as it is taken, and why a document that states a rule should
say how the rule is checked.
Recorded as ADR 0019.