jschoubben
cf9357e8e9
What the mesh is, what it is becoming, and why. Implementation lives in the code repositories; the reasoning lives here. 00-GENESIS mission, engineering context, effect, and the rules that hold 01-RESEARCH investigations, before they harden into design 02-DESIGN the authoritative specification adr numbered decisions — what was chosen, and what was rejected DECISIONS.md the ledger: every decision, in the order it was taken Written for a reader who is not its author and has no access to the mesh it describes. Addresses use the documentation ranges of RFC 5737 and RFC 1918; nodes are named by role. Single initial commit by intent. The prior history came from a private repository and carried operational detail — a routable address identified as a VPN hub, real domain names, a hosting provider — which sanitising a tip commit would not have removed from the log.
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Mission
Vision
A mesh that controls itself.
An agent states an intent — in words, from wherever they already are — and the mesh carries it out. It takes the request in, works out what it means, does the work across whichever nodes it needs, and returns a result. No console to open, no runbook to follow, no remembering which node holds which thing.
Not automation, which does what it was told to do in advance. Self-control: the mesh holds the context, decides how, and acts.
Mission
Build the layer that turns a set of nodes into one self-controlling mesh.
- Intake, process, deliver. A request arrives, is understood, becomes work, and returns an answer. That loop is the product; everything else exists to make it possible.
- Agents inhabit the mesh. They are not scripts that run and exit. They hold identity, memory and skills, run on whichever node has room, and act continuously.
- The mesh brokers everything the work needs. Storage, credentials, compute, knowledge, delivery — requested by capability, resolved by the mesh, never by the requester knowing where things are.
Agents, some of whom are human
There is one kind of participant: the agent. Some agents are human and some are not, and the mesh does not treat that as a category difference. Both hold identity, both hold credentials, both act, remember and coordinate. What differs is modality — how an agent acts:
- a non-human agent acts through a spawned session and the record
- a human agent acts through a shell, a desktop, a message from a phone
That is why a desktop environment is as much a core concern as a knowledge store. One is how some agents remember; the other is how some agents act. Neither is a courtesy extended to a user outside the system.
What belongs in the mesh's own domain
A core module supports an agent's participation — acting, remembering, coordinating, or interfacing with the mesh.
A media server supports a human, but not their participation. It is therefore not a core module. It is still a perfectly valid HAL module — the mesh installs it, provisions for it, brokers its capabilities and ships it through the same pipeline. Entirely legitimate as a module, and no part of the mesh's own domain.
The distinction is core module versus module the mesh runs, not module versus not-a-module. Both use the same manifest, the same pipeline, the same provisioning — which is exactly what makes the mesh's own components no more privileged than anything else it carries.
Core values
- Evidence over assertion. A claim that cannot be checked will quietly stop being true. Say what was measured.
- Failure must be loud. The expensive faults are always the silent ones — work that reported success and did nothing. Prefer failing to lying.
- The mesh owns the truth. State lives in the mesh and is derived onto nodes. A file edited on a node is a bug with a delay on it.
- Sovereignty. The mesh runs on nodes it owns. External dependencies are deliberate and few.
- Dogfood everything. The mesh's own components ship through the same machinery as anything else it runs. If they need an exception, the machinery is not finished.