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hq/01-RESEARCH
jschoubben 9d091c81e0 A build edge, a core library that is a domain, and 0063 corrected
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code" would have enforced a rule now withdrawn.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.
2026-08-28 18:25:28 +02:00
..

01-RESEARCH

Investigations that have not yet hardened into design.

Structure

Each effort lives in NNN-descriptive-name/ and must contain 00-overview.md, carrying its state in YAML frontmatter and a prose summary below it:

---
status: active | graduated | abandoned
initiated: YYYY-MM-DD
touches: []          # design docs, subsystems or areas the effort bears on
became: []           # required when status is terminal — what it turned into
---

The prose says what is being investigated, why, and what it touches. It does not restate the status — status lives in one place, and two places is one too many.

Further documents in the same folder hold the work itself: notes, evidence, option analyses, draft designs.

Lifecycle

status Meaning
active Investigation in progress.
graduated Checked against 00-META, decided in 02-DECISIONS/, and specified in 03-DESIGN — see became:.
abandoned Stopped or superseded. Nothing is deleted.

An effort graduates by producing a decision record and a 03-DESIGN entry. It is abandoned in place — never deleted. What was rejected, and why, is the more expensive half to rediscover.

Starting and closing efforts is playbook territory: 00-META/process/01-research.md and 02-graduation.md.

Rules

  • Markdown only. Do not skip or reuse a sequence number.
  • Evidence, not assertion. An effort that measured nothing has not finished.
  • Research describes real observations but never identifies the mesh it observed. The shape of a finding survives anonymisation intact.