A sweep for claims overtaken by the last few days. Annotated rather than rewritten, following the pattern already in 0049 -- what changed and why is the useful part, and an accepted record should not quietly become something else. 0057's init section was wrong on all three of its claims. It said the host needs FOUR things from an init; 0061 reduced that to one. It said every machine the mesh targets already has systemd; Alpine does not, and it is the intended first node. It said there is no second init to abstract over; there is now, and the answer is still not an abstraction -- it is a four-line file per system. What survives is the part that was always right: an init is not a dependency in 0041's sense, because it is not installed, it is what the machine already is. 0048 named Docker as the container runtime. It is now docker or podman, detected rather than chosen -- because adoption keeps what a machine already has, so naming one contradicted a rule already decided. That row is the only one of the five that names two, and the record now says why. 0060 claimed the bundle is portable across operating systems. Its mechanism is; its contents are not -- package names, unit names, service names all differ, so an Arch host embeds an Arch bundle. That was my error, and it is the exact confusion behind the question that found it. The design layer had the same drift: 07 and 09 said "Docker" where they meant a container runtime, 09 said systemd restarts the host after an upgrade when the launcher does, and both install snippets assumed Arch. They now show Alpine and Arch side by side, which makes the point better than prose did -- step 1 differs per system, step 2 never does. Checked and NOT changed: 0047's "the vocabulary grows by one shape" is a claim about the rate, not the count, and is still true. 0037 lists docker among tools the host manages, which it does. 0041 says nothing about either.
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.