jschoubben
93470f6162
The bootstrap's sharpest open question, and the framing was wrong. "State on this machine" was being read as the filesystem and the service manager. A service running on this machine IS part of this machine — writing a file and creating a database in a local store differ in mechanism, not in scope. The real question was underneath: must the host learn what a database is? It must not. Giving it a `database` resource type means tier 0 knows Postgres, then a bucket, then a virtual host — the host acquiring the substrate's vocabulary one service at a time, which is what ADR 0037 exists to stop. So the bundle declares an ACTION and the host runs it and verifies it. What a database means stays with the module that provides one; the host knows only how to run a declared action against something local and check the result. Its vocabulary grows by one shape rather than by one resource type per service. Actions are permitted in the bundle and forbidden over the link, and the asymmetry is deliberate. A bundle arrives WITH the binary: anyone able to put a hostile action in it could equally have put it in the host itself, so refusing actions there buys nothing and costs the bootstrap. The link is a separate party, reachable separately, and an action there is the unbounded blast radius ADR 0039 refuses. That decision stands unchanged. And ongoing provisioning is not the host's at all — the control plane does it once a mesh exists — so the asymmetry costs nothing. Which dissolves the earlier worry about one mechanism with a tier boundary inside it: there are two mechanisms, with different actors, scopes and trust models, and that is the answer rather than a compromise. Named rather than hidden: this is the escape hatch research 011 warned about, arbitrary code in the place hardest to remove later. It is bounded by being bundle-only and by every action having to declare how it verifies itself, and that boundary is the whole defence.
02-DECISIONS
Architecture decision records — the "why" trail behind the rules in
00-META and the specifications in 03-DESIGN.
Numbered 02 because a decision precedes the design it authorises. Research concludes,
the decision is recorded here, and only then is the design written. Following the folder
numbers walks the process in the order it happens.
One file per decision, numbered, never deleted. A superseded record has its status: changed
and gains a pointer to what replaced it — its text is never edited. The reasoning that was
rejected is the expensive half to rediscover.
The records run in the order the decisions were taken, oldest first.
Every decision is a record. There is no ledger and no index file — if a decision is worth
recording it is worth a record, and if it is not worth a record it is not recorded
(ADR 0026). A "decision" small enough to be one line is
almost always a rule, and a rule belongs in
00-META/how-we-build.md, where it is enforced and keeps the
incident that earned it.
Frontmatter
---
status: proposed | accepted | superseded
date: YYYY-MM-DD # when the decision was taken, not when it was written down
deciders: name
reconstructed: true|false # true when the record was written after the fact from evidence
superseded-by: # 02-DECISIONS/NNNN-....md, when status is superseded
extends: # 02-DECISIONS/NNNN-....md, when this record widens an earlier one
---
Body
# N. Title in plain language
## Context what was true, with evidence
## Considered Options numbered, each with why it was rejected
## Decision what was decided
## Consequences what follows, including what got harder
## References commits, pull requests, knowledge-base entries, prior art
State evidence, not assertion. "Zero of 124 modules declare brain as a dependency"
outranks "the dependency rule is not followed".
Reconstructed records
Records 0001–0014 were written on 2026-08-23, after the decisions they describe. Records 0015 onward were taken as records. Those
decisions were taken in implementation rather than in a document; the records state what was
decided and the evidence it was decided from, and each carries reconstructed: true and says
so in its first lines.
A reconstructed record is not a transcript. Where the deliberation is not recoverable, the options section states what the alternatives were and why the chosen one won on the evidence available — not a discussion that did not happen. Where a date is not establishable it says so rather than guessing.
Index
The index is generated, not maintained — run the hq-status skill, which reads the
frontmatter of every record. A hand-written index drifts from the folder it describes, and
this one had already done so after a single addition.