Files
hq/00-META
mesh-tools dbc7406490
mesh/merge-gate head dbc740649039 merged into trunk 90c67930969b — pass: the change touches no module of the mesh's graph
mesh/repo-check head dbc740649039 merged into trunk 90c67930969b — pass: its merge-check.sh passed
mesh/delivery delivered
Playbook 07: a new node-engine key needs the controller's pin moved first, and a release that must merge first has a branch name of its own (issue 1051)
Feature owned-paths (issue 1024) planned no controller release for a new key on directory resources, though the controller judges every machine with the node-engine's vendored validator; and the controller's release, on the feature's branch name, joined the catalogue's delivery group and could not merge before it.
2026-10-17 18:19:35 +00:00
..

00-META

The northern star. What the mesh is, the environment it runs in, and what changes when it works — plus the engineering practice that holds across everything Novox builds. Every research effort and design decision is checked against this folder.

File / folder Purpose
mission.md Vision, mission, and the values that decide arguments
context.md The environment — conditions, not aspirations
effect.md What is different when the work is done
how-we-build.md The rules that hold across the mesh, each one earned. The source of the mesh constitution — the governed page the mesh injects into design sessions is derived from it.
glossary.md One name per thing — the authority on vocabulary, and the words that were retired
repos.md Where implementation lives, and what each repository owns
process/ The playbooks — how work moves through this repository, for engineers and agents alike

Rules

  • Markdown only.
  • Stable by nature. Changes here reflect a genuine shift in intent, not iteration. The one exception is how-we-build.md, which changes whenever a rule is earned — and only through its amendment process.
  • Research and design must be traceable back to what is written here.
  • Instance-agnostic. These documents describe the mesh as a concept. No machine names, no counts, no topology.

On the architecture overview in the code repository

The code repository carries an architecture overview predating this folder. It is a useful description of how the mesh works, and its content now lives — anonymised and checked against the implementation — in 03-DESIGN/00-as-is/. GENESIS answers why; that document answered how, which is the design layer's job.

It had also drifted from the implementation in ways worth recording, since both were found by comparing it against the code rather than by anyone noticing:

  • It described the pipeline as having a separate builder process and a build stage that packages. Neither was true after 2026-08-04; the documents stayed stale until 2026-08-06 (ADR 0010).
  • It listed the mesh as spanning a fixed number of named machines, which is exactly the content this repository cannot carry.

It also lists "symlinks, not copies" as a key design principle, and that is a genuine contradiction rather than a stale detail. The mesh's stated intent is that it creates no symlinks at all — the rule is not merely "only the installer may link", and a founding document elevating linking to a principle points the opposite way from where this is going.

What exists today is that the installer owns and reconciles every link (ADR 0012) — an as-is fact, recorded in 03-DESIGN/00-as-is/05-runtime-and-installation.md. Centralising who may link narrowed the incident class; it did not close it. The intent is to remove the mechanism, recorded as ADR 0012.

A founding document contradicting the direction of travel is precisely the failure this folder exists to prevent.