**0024 accepted.** Model access was decided, built, and proven in the lab, and two design documents rest on it; only the status had never moved. The gate is green again. **The work breakdown rewritten.** It planned a decomposition of the existing system in place — extract contexts, declared features, shrink the shared library. That is not the work. A replacement is being built beside it, and only the old Phase 0 survived contact with reality, so the one document meant to say what happens next was describing a system being retired. Now ordered by what "modules move across one at a time until the old registry is off" actually requires: - Phase 0 is marked done against the twenty-two lab assertions, **and carries its own limitation**: every module exercised was written to test the mechanism, so the vocabulary was shaped by its own fixtures. - Phase 1 is the vocabulary gaps found by asking what real modules need — an object-store provision, a session as a licence consumer, a network shape with ordering, public certificate issuance. - Phase 2 is one module, then a week of running it, because the point of going first is to find what Phase 1 missed. - Phase 3 picks modules that each prove something the first did not; the mail system is last because it is the one that may send work back into the declaration language. - Phase 4 is switching the registry off, named as a phase so it is not mistaken for the goal. Keeps the rules of engagement unchanged — they were about how work is done, not what it is — with one addition: stop and ask before anything that touches a machine outside the lab. Adds a section on keeping the list true, since the document it replaces was wrong for weeks and nothing said so. A claim here is counted, not reasoned, and a phase is done when the lab says so.
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.