jschoubben
e1febe8e0f
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.
3.0 KiB
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 0011). 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) 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.
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.