ADR 0032: a scenario is a closed address space. Every segment materialises as its own isolated link belonging to one instance, so two scenarios raised from the same declaration hold the same addresses and never meet. The declaration keeps its literal addresses and they mean what they say — allocating from a pool would have made them a fiction, so a scenario reproducing a specific topology would stop reproducing it. The constraint that follows shapes everything: the lab never reaches into a scenario over IP. It talks to machines through the virtualisation layer's own channel. If it reached them by address, the workstation would need a route into each scenario, and two carrying the same prefix would give it two routes to one destination — failing not with an error but by one scenario's traffic arriving in another. That also makes reachability an honest question. Can this machine reach that one is asked from INSIDE, by executing on the first, rather than probed from a workstation that is not on the network and whose opinion would be a different question with a misleadingly similar answer. The lifecycle itself: six verbs, of which raise and destroy are enough to be useful and the rest are what make repetition cheap. Raising is convergent rather than incremental, because a lab behaving differently from the thing it tests teaches the wrong habit. A failed raise leaves the wreckage standing. Tearing down on failure destroys the only evidence, which is backwards — a scenario that failed to raise is more interesting than one that succeeded. Snapshots are whole-scenario. Per-machine would be cheaper and wrong: the mesh keeps state spanning nodes, so restoring one machine while its peers move on produces a mesh that has never existed, and faults found there would be artefacts of the lab. Closes the declaration's open question about running several scenarios at once.
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.