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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001 — Module domain decomposition
- Status: ONGOING — ADR 0001 accepted; graduates when
02-DESIGNcarries the per-context specifications - Initiated by: jochen, 2026-08-22
- Areas touched: every
hal/*andnoxflow/*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_accountis in noxflow's database — even though agent identity is a mesh concept and node identity already lives in the mesh registry. - Whether
hal/brainmay depend on noxflow took three attempts to answer, twice wrongly, because the ownership boundary was never stated. - Authoritative documentation existed in
mesh_docsand 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".