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The conversion method, recorded because it decides everything else and was not written down. The old control plane is stopped — provisioning, coordinator, syncs, the pipeline, anything that decides or writes. The workloads it was managing keep running, because nothing is managing them. The new mesh then takes ownership one module at a time. Nothing is ever unassigned in the old system. Unassigning is how it removes things and removing is how data is lost; it is asked to stop having opinions, never to take anything away. Disabled rather than merely stopped, which is the part easy to get wrong: those units are enabled, so a stop lasts until the next reboot. A reboot mid-conversion would bring the old control plane back to regenerate managed files underneath the new one — the one situation where two systems really would fight over a machine. A service left running with nothing managing it is the safe state: it has its data, its configuration is on disk, and nothing will change either. The risk in a conversion is in the managing, not the running. Also records why taking ownership piecemeal is safe: the new host's orphan removal is per-origin, so it only removes what it recorded itself. Services it was never told about are not orphans to it.
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.