jschoubben
becae7ba51
The flow the process overview draws — idea/symptom -> decision -> to-be design -> code -> as-is — was enforced by nothing. cycle.py now refuses a to-be design naming no decision, an in-progress/implemented design naming no owning code, a located/fixed issue with no owner, a fixed/resolved issue with no fix, and a graduated research overview that does not say what it became. AGENTS.md carries the cycle and a where-to-look table so a fresh session (or a cleared context) finds the chain in frontmatter instead of assuming it. Grounding the check surfaced two real gaps, fixed here: the work-ahead design named no owning code, and research 003 listed one became target twice. https://claude.ai/code/session_01D6qtiYU3P9jk3pnAXyAFyx
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Process — overview
How work moves through HQ, and who may do what. Every other document in this folder is a playbook: trigger, who runs it, steps, outputs. Engineers and agents follow the same playbooks; agents must not act outside them.
The audiences
| Audience | Contract |
|---|---|
| Engineers | Read and write everything. HQ is the single source of truth for mission, research, design, decisions and issue diagnosis. |
| Agents | The same rights as engineers, exercised through these playbooks. |
| Anyone else | This repository is public and written for them, but it is not a support channel. Nothing here identifies the mesh it describes. |
The knowledge 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
how-we-build.md ──► constitution sync ──► knowledge base ──► injected into design meetings
The two design layers
03-DESIGN holds two layers that are never mixed:
| Layer | What it is | Changes when |
|---|---|---|
00-as-is/ |
The mesh that exists today. Describes shipped behaviour, including behaviour nobody would choose again. | Something ships, or an as-is claim is found to be wrong. |
01-to-be/ |
The mesh being built toward. Every statement traceable to a record in 02-DECISIONS/. |
A decision is taken or amended. |
A to-be document that ships does not move. Its as-is counterpart is written or updated, the
to-be document's frontmatter goes to 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.
The playbooks
| # | Playbook | Trigger |
|---|---|---|
| 01 | Research | An idea worth investigating before committing to design |
| 02 | Graduation & design change | Research concludes, or a design must change |
| 03 | Issues | Something is wrong — often with the owner unknown |
| 04 | Build handoff | A design is ready to be built |
| 05 | Constitution sync | how-we-build.md changed a rule the mesh enforces |
| 06 | Writing a module | Something that runs today must run on the mesh |
| 07 | Feature branches across repos | Work that changes code, in one repo or several at once |
The cycle is checked
The flow above is a rule, and a rule states how it is checked:
00-META/checks/cycle.py refuses a to-be design that names no
decision, an in-progress/implemented design that names no owning code, an issue marked
located/fixed with no owner or fixed/resolved with no fix, and a graduated
research overview that does not say what it became. Run it with records.py and index.py
before any HQ merge. What the checks cannot see — that code work actually started from a
handoff — is held by playbooks 04 and 07:
a feature branch exists because a design or an issue sent it.
Status lives in frontmatter
Research overviews, design docs, issue reports and decision records each carry their status as
YAML frontmatter (schemas in the section READMEs and playbooks). There are no central status
files and no decision ledger. Every decision is a record in
02-DECISIONS — if it is worth recording it is worth a record, and if
it is not worth a record it is not recorded. Cross-cutting views, the decision index included,
are generated on demand by the hq-status skill and never written to disk.