jschoubben
c3a2984b3e
The effort was opened to ask whether the catalogue's missing structure is a graph. It is not missing. 126 manifests, 103 edges, no cycles, nothing dangling, deepest chain of five — and a resolver in the SDK that topologically sorts them, already called by the tool loader at startup, the installer when syncing modules onto a node, and the delivery coordinator when expanding what a change affects. It already does something this effort assumed would need designing: a requirement on another module's provision is treated as an implicit edge to the module that provides it. So "ordering by the graph", which ADR 0043 makes the control plane's job, is a thing to call rather than a thing to build. The one place the graph is wrong, it is wrong about the substrate. A module needing a database declares `provider: postgres` inside `provisions:` — which is what a module OFFERS — so the resolver, which reads `dependencies:` and `requires:`, never sees it. Three edges are invisible this way, and they are the mesh's own database, the mesh's own broker, and the work engine's database. The consequence is measurable: computing what a working mesh needs from the declared graph gives registry -> sdk -> mesh -> meshware. Four modules, four levels, no database. Arithmetically correct and obviously wrong, for exactly one reason — a field that means "depends on" is not read as one. That is 04-ISSUES/003 in a new form: not a key nothing reads, but a key read as something other than what it means. Two latent defects, both contrary to ADR 0008 and both in the component ADR 0043 makes responsible for ordering a host will apply without question: a cycle warns and falls back to input order, and a dependency that does not exist warns and continues. Neither has fired, because the catalogue currently has no cycles and nothing dangling, which is why nobody has noticed. And placement is decided in the catalogue: a provision pins itself to a named node in the manifest. Which node runs what is an inventory decision — tier 2 by the skeleton's own test — so a second node cannot provide the mesh's database without editing the module that consumes it. What the graph would DELETE is currently nothing. What it would add is three declarations that no manifest uses today: excludes, a required node capability, and an interface with adapters. Whether they would be used is not measured, and zero usage is equally consistent with nobody needing them and nobody being able to express them.
Novox HQ
The single source of truth for what Novox builds — what it is, what it is becoming,
and why. Today that is almost entirely Novox Mesh, the substrate everything else runs on. Implementation lives in modules/; the reasoning behind it lives here.
Structure
| Folder | Purpose |
|---|---|
00-META |
Mission, foundational context, the rules that hold across the mesh, the repository map, and the process playbooks. The northern star for every decision. |
01-RESEARCH |
Active and historical investigations, before they harden into design. |
02-DECISIONS |
Numbered decision records, in the order the decisions were taken — what was chosen, and what was rejected. |
03-DESIGN |
The authoritative specification, in two layers: 00-as-is — the mesh that exists — and 01-to-be — the one being built toward. |
04-ISSUES |
The front door for "something is wrong" at the level of design or governance. |
The numbering is the flow. Research produces a decision; the decision authorises a design.
That is why decisions are 02 and design is 03 — a reader following the numbers walks the
process in the order it happens.
The 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
00-META/how-we-build.md ──► sync ──► the constitution the mesh injects into design sessions
Implementation lives in the code repositories — see
00-META/repos.md. Every workflow is a playbook in
00-META/process/; agents operate through them and not outside them.
Rules
- Markdown only.
- No new top-level folders without explicit confirmation.
- Knowledge flows
GENESIS → RESEARCH → DESIGN. Research graduates into design only after analysis against GENESIS confirms alignment, and only through a recorded decision. - Status lives in frontmatter, never in a central status file. Cross-cutting views are generated on demand, never hand-maintained.
- GENESIS and DESIGN are instance-agnostic. They describe the mesh as a concept — no machine names, no counts, no topology. A reader must not be able to tell how many nodes the author happened to have.
- RESEARCH describes real observations, but never identifies the mesh it observed. Evidence is what makes research worth reading, and the shape of a finding survives anonymisation intact — a node publicly named but behind a household NAT carries the whole lesson without naming anything.
- The as-is layer records what is, not what should be — including behaviour nobody would choose again. A layer that keeps only the good decisions is a brochure.
- A document that states a rule about the mesh should say how that rule is checked. This repository has a rule requiring every capability-exposing module to declare the core runtime as a dependency; zero modules do. An unenforced rule is indistinguishable from a wrong one.
This repository is public
Written for a reader who is not its author and has no access to the mesh it describes. Concretely, nothing here may contain:
- routable addresses, real domain names, hosting providers, or node names — use the
documentation ranges (RFC 5737
203.0.113.0/24, RFC 1918) and role names such asanchor,home-server,workstation,laptop - absolute paths from anyone's machine, usernames, home directories, or email addresses
- credentials in any form, including lengths or hashes of live secrets
- operational detail that is only useful to an attacker — which host is the VPN hub, on which port, which node is reachable only through a forwarded port
Private-range addresses and the overlay plan are fine: they describe a pattern, not a target.
The test is whether a paragraph would still teach something to a stranger running an entirely different mesh. If it would, it belongs. If it only makes sense to someone who knows this particular installation, it is either a note in the wrong place or a disclosure.
Why this is its own repository
It began inside the code repository, on the reasoning that the mesh already has a mesh-native knowledge store and that adding a fourth knowledge system would repeat the mistake this folder was created to fix.
That objection was about a fourth knowledge system, and the answer offered was indexing rather than location — that these documents would be indexed into the knowledge base, so a symptom search returns them beside everything else. One source, many surfaces. Where the source is authored is then a separate question.
That indexing does not exist. It was checked on 2026-08-23 and returns nothing; it appears
never to have existed. Until it does, the objection stands unanswered and this repository is
the fourth knowledge system it was argued not to be. Recorded as
04-ISSUES/006, and
left standing here rather than quietly reworded, because a claim that held up a decision and
was never checked is precisely the failure this repository exists to name.
Answered separately, a repository of its own is the better home:
- The cadence is different. A decision changes when thinking changes, not when code changes. Tying documents to a code branch means they merge on the code's schedule.
- The reviewers are different. A design argument is not reviewed the way an implementation is, and it should not queue behind a build.
- The scope is wider than one repository. ADR 0015 sends most modules out of the monorepo entirely. Documentation that governs several repositories cannot live inside one of them.
The trade is real and worth naming: a change to a document and the change to the code it
describes can no longer land in one commit. Keeping them honest is a discipline now rather
than a mechanism — which is why every decision is recorded in
02-DECISIONS as it is taken, and why a document that states a rule should
say how the rule is checked.
Recorded as ADR 0019.