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The consolidation left a sparse sequence -- 1, 4, 6, 7, 9, 10, 12, 15, 16, 18, 19, 25, 34, 35, 36, 37, 40, 42, 44, 45, 48, 49, 58 -- where the gaps were only the archaeology of what used to be there. Renumbered contiguously. Renames run in ascending order, so every target number is already free and no two files ever collide. The reference rewrite is one simultaneous pass rather than a sequence of replacements. Numbers moved into slots other numbers were vacating -- the node host went 37 to 16 while the lab went 16 to 9 -- so replacing one at a time would have cascaded and silently pointed things at the wrong record. Seven plain-text references survived the merges as prose rather than links, naming records that no longer existed: the enrolment token, the link boundary, what a declaration is, reachability, the repository structure. Each mapped to the consolidated record that now holds it. Verified rather than assumed: every [ADR NNNN](path) link now has matching text and target, checked across the whole repository, and the checker passes. Frontmatter `consolidates:` lists dropped -- they named records that are gone, and each consolidated record already says in prose what it absorbed.
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layer, status, code, updated, decisions
| layer | status | code | updated | decisions | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| as-is | implemented |
|
2026-08-23 |
|
Agents and work
The mesh does a large share of its own design and implementation. Agents are how, and the model they run under is the employee model, not a worker pool.
An agent is an employee
An agent is a singular named identity with a home node, a workspace on that node, accumulating memory, and an explicit lifecycle (ADR 0007).
| Property | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Lifecycle state | Active, draining, or retired. Retired agents are kept. |
| Home node | Where its workspace lives. One node per agent. |
| Session cap | How much work it may hold at once. Concurrency is a property of the agent, not a count of copies. |
| Kind | Whether it is hirable, or is a node's own agent and exempt from hiring |
The verbs are explicit: an agent is hired onto a node, reassigned only while idle, and retired by draining first — forcing it is a deliberate act that aborts work in flight.
Surge capacity lives inside the model rather than against it. A template agent is a blueprint with no life of its own; when a queue grows past a threshold it is cloned into a real agent with a lifetime, which drains and retires when that expires. A temporary employee is still an employee.
Because there is a continuing subject, policy becomes possible: an agent that violates a rule can be warned, and a warned agent can be dismissed. A pool cannot be warned.
Some agents are human
There is one kind of participant. What differs is modality — a non-human agent acts through a spawned session and the record; a human agent acts through a shell, a desktop, or a message. Both hold identity, both act, both accumulate memory.
The mesh does not currently record modality completely. Which user, on which node, a human agent acts as is required by the model and not stored — an open question carried over from ADR 0008.
Work
Work is expressed as tasks moving through workflows. A workflow names the states a kind of work passes through and what must be true to leave each one; a task carries its acceptance criteria and its trail.
Several workflow shapes exist for different sizes of work — a single implementation, a larger container of related work, and shapes that add analysis or design stages ahead of implementation.
The area's characteristic defects are transition defects rather than logic defects: a task bouncing between review and implementation because a guard was evaluated on stale state, a result that cannot be recorded in the same act as the transition it justifies. The workflow engine's correctness is about atomicity, and that is where it has been wrong.
Meetings
Some work is decided in a meeting: several agents in turns, with distinct roles, over a template that names the phases.
This is where governance meets execution. The constitution is injected into every eligible meeting turn — agents do not fetch it, it arrives — and a check phase verifies the meeting's output against it before the meeting may proceed (ADR 0005). A named violation blocks progress.
Meeting turns run on the orchestrator's node regardless of where the participating agents are pinned. That is a known divergence between the model and its execution, not a design intent.
What this rests on that is not built
The work domain shares one large schema with several other domains. That is the concrete
instance of a rule stated in how-we-build.md — contexts
integrate through the record, never through a shared schema — being violated by the mesh's
own largest component, and it is the reason work that belongs to one domain keeps having to be
implemented in another.
ADR 0008 dissolves that arrangement. Until it does, this is the shape.