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 "The build output contains no runtime code" would have enforced a rule now withdrawn.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.
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.