jschoubben
cabe873503
Records the branching-and-merging workflow for code changes across the mesh repos, written against a failure it names: branches and MRs opened per unit of thought, treated as done when opened not merged, and named differently per repo, so they pile up unmerged — one session left sixteen to consolidate by hand. The rule is one feat/<slug> shared across every repo a feature touches, isolated in .work/<slug>/<repo> worktrees off main, pushed and opened as one MR per repo only when the whole feature is done, then merged promptly. Adds the ground-rule pointer in AGENTS.md and the row in the process overview. Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01LrgweAeERJYBg88c5cKDzF
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Agent instructions — Novox HQ
This repository is the source of truth for Novox's mission, research, design and decisions —
today almost entirely those of Novox Mesh, its first product (ADR 0028). Implementation lives in the code repositories (see
00-META/repos.md).
Before changing anything here, read the playbooks in
00-META/process/ — every workflow (research, graduation, design
amendment, issues, build handoff, constitution sync, feature branches) is documented there, and
agents operate through them. Thin skills in .claude/skills/ wrap these playbooks for invocation
(hq-new-research, hq-graduate, hq-new-issue, hq-diagnose, hq-amend-design,
hq-handoff, hq-sync-constitution, hq-status); each defers to its playbook as
authoritative and adds only the mechanical scaffolding.
Ground rules
- Markdown only. No new top-level folders without explicit confirmation.
- Status lives in YAML frontmatter — on research overviews (
status,became), design docs (layer,status,code,updated), issue reports (status,located-in,fixed-by,amended-design) and decision records (status,date,deciders). Never create a central status file; cross-cutting views are generated from frontmatter. 02-DECISIONS/records are immutable. Supersede with a new record; never edit meaning. Fixing a broken link or path is allowed.- Design docs are prose and diagrams only — no code. A manifest field may be named; a manifest may not be pasted.
- Two layers, never mixed.
03-DESIGN/00-as-is/describes the mesh that exists;03-DESIGN/01-to-be/describes the one being built toward. Every design doc says which it is inlayer:. 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. 00-META/how-we-build.mdis the source of the mesh constitution. The knowledge-base constitution page is derived from it — see playbook05-constitution-sync.md. Never edit the derived page directly.- One feature, one branch, one MR per repo. A code change spanning one or more repos uses a
single
feat/<slug>shared across every repo it touches, isolated in.work/<slug>/<repo>worktrees offmain; push and open MRs only when the whole feature is done, then merge promptly and delete the branch. Per-increment branches and MRs that pile up unmerged are the failure this prevents — see playbook06-feature-branches.md.
This repository is public
Nothing here may contain routable addresses, real domain names, hosting providers, node
names, absolute paths, usernames, credentials, or operational detail useful only to an
attacker. Use documentation ranges (RFC 5737, RFC 1918) and role names — anchor,
home-server, workstation, laptop, the build node, the broker node.
The test: would this paragraph still teach a stranger running an entirely different mesh?
If yes, it belongs. If it only makes sense to someone who knows this installation, it is
either a note in the wrong place or a disclosure. The full rule is in
README.md.
A rule states how it is checked
If a document states a rule about the mesh, it says how that rule is verified. An unenforced rule is indistinguishable from a wrong one, and costs more, because people believe it.