Answers issue 151. Copying the roster into each container made the roster part of each container's identity, so one name moving replaced every container in the mesh — and it never stopped the staleness it was for, since a copy taken at creation is stale the moment the roster moves (109, 135). A container resolves through its machine's resolver instead, and nothing is copied. Staleness stops being possible rather than detected, and a name's blast radius becomes nothing. Scoping each container to the names it binds was the close call and is rejected: it contradicts anything-calls-anything, and leaves the roster in the digest so the churn returns for a widely-bound name. Gated on issue 110 — a container on the runtime's default network has no DNS at all today. Removing the copy first reintroduces 109 and 135 silently on a live mesh. 151 stays open until the code lands; design 08's file-not-resolver passage is narrowed to the machine's own roster.
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.