jschoubben
64ae75a480
The graph had no owner: what modules are, what they require, what they claim and what they are built against all sat in the control plane because that is where it was written first. The control plane's own test says otherwise — anything a single machine could answer alone is not its work, and what a module needs requires no knowledge of any node. So the catalogue becomes a core module beside the control plane and the builder, owning the graph and serving tools over it. The control plane consumes it, which is the opposite of what the tiers suggest and is therefore stated rather than inferred. That makes the catalogue a fourth thing that cannot arrive through the ordinary path, so the claim written this morning that the list was closed at three is corrected. All four are answered by one mechanism instead: the installer carries an init builder and the core modules are built on the machine, so what is carried is a builder rather than a result and nothing is left without a route. Two things are open and named rather than assumed: where the init builder clones from, given the forge normally runs on the mesh it would be rebuilding, and what it publishes into, given the registry is installed later in the order today. Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01D6qtiYU3P9jk3pnAXyAFyx
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.