jschoubben
e3934e4449
Closes the last open question about what the substrate contains. 0006 left an identity provider conditional — substrate only if the control plane delegated authentication — and said the decision had not been taken. It is now: it delegates to nothing. The conditional was never about machines. A node proves itself with a keypair it generated over a broker account issued at enrolment, and declarations are verified by signature; none of that involves an identity provider. It was only ever about whether a person signing in to a mesh surface would be authenticated by something else. So the substrate is three — a relational store, a message bus, an image registry — and with 0028 having removed the object store, no member is conditional and every one is there for the same reason. It does not settle how a person signs in to a surface, deliberately. What is settled is that whatever answers that is not something which must exist before the mesh does, so it can be decided late or replaced — which being substrate would have prevented.
03-DESIGN
The authoritative specification. Implementation is built against what is written here.
Two layers
| Folder | What it is |
|---|---|
00-as-is/ |
The mesh that exists today. Shipped behaviour, described as it is — including behaviour nobody would choose again. |
01-to-be/ |
The mesh being built toward. Every statement traceable to a record in 02-DECISIONS/. |
They are never mixed. 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.
When a to-be design ships, it does not move. Its as-is counterpart is written or updated,
the to-be document's status becomes implemented, and both stand — one describing what runs,
the other recording what was intended. Deleting the intention loses the reasoning, which is
the expensive half.
Frontmatter
Every design document (not the READMEs) carries:
---
layer: as-is | to-be
status: designed | in-progress | implemented | abandoned
code: [] # owning code repo(s), from 00-META/repos.md
updated: YYYY-MM-DD # date of the last status change, not of text edits
decisions: [] # 02-DECISIONS/ records this document rests on
---
For an as-is document, status: implemented is the normal state — it describes something that
runs — and code: names where that implementation lives.
Status changes when implementation state changes, never because design text was edited. An
implemented claim must be defensible from the owning repository's main branch, not from
intent. If it cannot be checked, it is in-progress.
Cross-cutting views are generated from this frontmatter by the hq-status skill and never
written to disk.
What belongs here
Functional analysis, architectural description, and specification — prose and diagrams
only, no code. A manifest field may be named; a manifest may not be pasted. A document
enters the to-be layer only after the decision behind it is recorded in 02-DECISIONS/
and the research that produced it is closed.
Subfolders are encouraged where a layer grows enough to need them.