Files
hq/01-RESEARCH
jschoubben f55ecc1a47 011: an abstract name needs providers that are actually substitutable
Two corrections from the operator, and the first improves the design rather than
narrowing it.

`database` is not an edge. The test it fails, and the test the proposal was
missing: can a consumer be switched from one provider to another WITHOUT
CHANGING? A module speaking Postgres does not speak MongoDB or SQL Server —
different wire protocol, dialect, driver — so a consumer declaring `requires:
database` and handed any of them breaks. The name promises what no provider can
deliver, and the resolver would report a requirement satisfied that is not.

`terminal` passes: anything that runs a command in a terminal works and the
consumer never learns which it got.

So the ADAPTER is what creates an interface. `ai-assistant` is legitimate exactly
because adapters normalise what is behind it. Without one there is no interface,
there is a category — and a category is a TAG. Tags describe, edges bind, and
keeping them apart is what stops the catalogue acquiring a second kind of
relationship that looks like a dependency and is not, which is what a folder
named after a domain already was.

And the domain module goes. A `networking` module gathering a firewall, a
resolver and a proxy under one name came from an older shape and does not fit —
there is no such thing to install. There is core infrastructure: concrete
modules named individually, not flavourable, with no grouping module standing in
front of them.

Fixed three places where the revision left the old rule standing, including an
example manifest still requiring `database` — the kind of contradiction that
would have been read as the design rather than as a leftover.
2026-08-26 22:44:37 +02:00
..

01-RESEARCH

Investigations that have not yet hardened into design.

Structure

Each effort lives in NNN-descriptive-name/ and must contain 00-overview.md, carrying its state in YAML frontmatter and a prose summary below it:

---
status: active | graduated | abandoned
initiated: YYYY-MM-DD
touches: []          # design docs, subsystems or areas the effort bears on
became: []           # required when status is terminal — what it turned into
---

The prose says what is being investigated, why, and what it touches. It does not restate the status — status lives in one place, and two places is one too many.

Further documents in the same folder hold the work itself: notes, evidence, option analyses, draft designs.

Lifecycle

status Meaning
active Investigation in progress.
graduated Checked against 00-META, decided in 02-DECISIONS/, and specified in 03-DESIGN — see became:.
abandoned Stopped or superseded. Nothing is deleted.

An effort graduates by producing a decision record and a 03-DESIGN entry. It is abandoned in place — never deleted. What was rejected, and why, is the more expensive half to rediscover.

Starting and closing efforts is playbook territory: 00-META/process/01-research.md and 02-graduation.md.

Rules

  • Markdown only. Do not skip or reuse a sequence number.
  • Evidence, not assertion. An effort that measured nothing has not finished.
  • Research describes real observations but never identifies the mesh it observed. The shape of a finding survives anonymisation intact.