Files
hq/01-RESEARCH/001-module-domain-decomposition/status.md
T
jschoubben cf9357e8e9 HQ — the mesh's own documentation
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.
2026-08-22 22:01:32 +02:00

2.0 KiB

001 — Module domain decomposition

  • Status: ONGOING — ADR 0001 accepted; graduates when 02-DESIGN carries the per-context specifications
  • Initiated by: jochen, 2026-08-22
  • Areas touched: every hal/* and noxflow/* module; the pipeline's dependency graph; the knowledge base; agent identity and credentials.

Summary

HAL has 124 modules. That number is not a maintenance problem in itself — it is the symptom of missing bounded contexts. Modules are split not because they model different domains, but because splitting is the only lever the platform offers:

  • no way to run one daemon on one node without making it a module (hal/claude-licences — one daemon, single-node)
  • no way to expose two of a kind from one module
  • no namespace separating the mesh from the software it runs

This effort establishes the current state, the ideal state, and the sequence between them.

Trigger

A night of debugging that produced four fixes and one conclusion. Every fault was a boundary fault:

  • Per-agent Claude credentials had to be written by the noxflow runtime, because agents.claude_account is in noxflow's database — even though agent identity is a mesh concept and node identity already lives in the mesh registry.
  • Whether hal/brain may depend on noxflow took three attempts to answer, twice wrongly, because the ownership boundary was never stated.
  • Authoritative documentation existed in mesh_docs and was not found, while a proposal in repo markdown was invisible to search entirely.

Decisions taken (2026-08-22)

Question Decision
What should noxflow become? Decompose into hal/* modules; noxflow returns to tasks/workflows
Who owns agent identity? hal/agents — a mesh concept, alongside nodes
Where do third-party apps live? Out of this repo. They run on the mesh; they are not of it
Knowledge structure Modelled on papa-hq; implementation choice left open

Open questions

Tracked in analysis.md under "Open questions".