jschoubben
c0b35652d0
papa-hq reads 01 research -> 03 decision -> 02 design. The order is a scar, not a choice: 02-DESIGN existed from its initial commit, and when adr/ was finally promoted on 2026-07-13 it took the next free number rather than its place in the sequence. By then design was too settled to renumber. hal-hq was three commits old, so it is not. adr/ becomes 02-DECISIONS and 02-DESIGN becomes 03-DESIGN, and following the folder numbers now walks the process in the order it happens: research produces a decision, the decision authorises a design. 00-GENESIS becomes 00-META, matching papa's rename from the same restructure. Every path reference rewritten across documents, frontmatter, playbooks and skills. All links resolve; all 58 frontmatter blocks parse and their path fields still point at files that exist.
60 lines
3.1 KiB
Markdown
60 lines
3.1 KiB
Markdown
# Process — overview
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How work moves through hal-hq, and who may do what. Every other document in this folder is a
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playbook: trigger, who runs it, steps, outputs. Engineers and agents follow the same
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playbooks; agents must not act outside them.
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## The audiences
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| Audience | Contract |
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| **Engineers** | Read and write everything. hal-hq is the single source of truth for mission, research, design, decisions and issue diagnosis. |
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| **Agents** | The same rights as engineers, exercised through these playbooks. |
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| **Anyone else** | This repository is public and written for them, but it is not a support channel. Nothing here identifies the mesh it describes. |
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## The knowledge flow
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```
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idea ──► 01-RESEARCH ──► decision (02-DECISIONS/) ──► 03-DESIGN/01-to-be ──► built (code repo)
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│ │ │
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│ │ └─► 03-DESIGN/00-as-is once shipped
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│ └────► abandoned (recorded, kept)
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└─(small/obvious, decision recorded in DECISIONS.md)────► 03-DESIGN directly
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symptom ──► 04-ISSUES ──► diagnosis ──► code-repo fix and/or design amendment
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how-we-build.md ──► constitution sync ──► knowledge base ──► injected into design meetings
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```
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## The two design layers
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`03-DESIGN` holds two layers that are never mixed:
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| Layer | What it is | Changes when |
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| `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. |
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| `01-to-be/` | The mesh being built toward. Every statement traceable to a record in `02-DECISIONS/`. | A decision is taken or amended. |
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A to-be document that ships does not move. Its as-is counterpart is written or updated, the
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to-be document's frontmatter goes to `implemented`, and both stand — one describing what runs,
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the other recording what was intended. Deleting the intention loses the reasoning, which is
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the expensive half.
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## The playbooks
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| # | Playbook | Trigger |
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| [01](01-research.md) | Research | An idea worth investigating before committing to design |
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| [02](02-graduation.md) | Graduation & design change | Research concludes, or a design must change |
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| [03](03-issues.md) | Issues | Something is wrong — often with the owner unknown |
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| [04](04-build-handoff.md) | Build handoff | A design is ready to be built |
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| [05](05-constitution-sync.md) | Constitution sync | `how-we-build.md` changed a rule the mesh enforces |
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## Status lives in frontmatter
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Research overviews, design docs, issue reports and decision records each carry their status as
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YAML frontmatter (schemas in the section READMEs and playbooks). There are **no central status
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files**. `DECISIONS.md` is a ledger of decisions as they were taken — an index and a home for
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decisions too small to warrant a record — and is explicitly *not* a status board. Cross-cutting
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views are generated on demand by the `hal-status` skill and never written to disk.
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