jschoubben
93a1231e00
Skills take the hq- prefix: they are HQ process workflows, not mesh workflows, and HQ is company-scoped now. hq-new-research, hq-graduate, hq-new-issue, hq-diagnose, hq-amend-design, hq-handoff, hq-sync-constitution, hq-status. Forward-looking prose becomes Novox Mesh or simply the mesh — the root README, AGENTS.md, the 00-META README, the mission's module example, and one to-be document that addressed 'someone working on HAL'. Three categories deliberately keep HAL, per ADR 0027: The monorepo is still called hal on the forge. repos.md, every code: field and every located-in: field name a repository that exists under that name, and renaming them in prose would make them false. The as-is layer and the research that measured it describe the system that runs, and that system is called HAL. 124 modules, 9 daemons, a dead containerised node — those are observations, not intentions. Records 0001-0026 are immutable. A record says what was decided when it was decided, and no record is edited for a name. Also repoints ADR 0022's link at the renamed skill — a path fix, which the immutability rule permits, not a change of meaning.
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status, date, deciders, reconstructed
| status | date | deciders | reconstructed |
|---|---|---|---|
| accepted | 2026-08-23 | jochen | false |
22. Status lives in frontmatter; cross-cutting views are generated
Context
Status was carried in prose — a bold line near the top of a document saying what state it was in — and indexes were maintained by hand. The decision-record index had already drifted from the folder it described after a single addition, which is about as short a demonstration as the failure mode offers.
A hand-maintained index is a copy of something the filesystem already knows. It is correct only for as long as everyone remembers it exists, and its being wrong is silent.
Considered options
- Prose status plus hand-maintained indexes. Rejected — the status quo, already demonstrably broken.
- A central status file. Rejected. It centralises the drift rather than removing it: the file and the documents disagree, and the file is the one people read.
- Machine-readable frontmatter per document; every cross-cutting view generated on demand. Chosen.
Decision
Every document carries its state in YAML frontmatter — research overviews, design documents, decision records, issue reports — with a schema stated in the section README.
There are no central status files. Every cross-cutting view — a status matrix, the decision-record index, the open-issue list — is generated from frontmatter when asked for, and never written to disk.
Prose does not restate status. One place, and two is one too many.
Consequences
- A view cannot drift from what it describes, because it does not persist.
- Status becomes queryable. Inconsistencies — a closed effort with nothing in
became:, animplementeddesign with no owning repository — are findable mechanically, and the generator reports them as flags rather than silently rendering around them. - Frontmatter must be valid and paths in it must resolve, which is now something to check.
- A reader browsing the repository on a forge sees no index. That is the trade: the index is correct and absent rather than present and wrong.
References
.claude/skills/hq-status/SKILL.md— the generator, including the inconsistencies it flags.02-DECISIONS/README.md— the hand-written index that drifted, and its removal.