hq/AGENTS.md

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 0019). 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.

Words

One name per thing. 00-META/glossary.md is the authority on vocabulary — controller (not "control plane"), foundation (not "substrate"), node and control-node, seat / bench / claim, package vs artifact. Use those words.

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 in layer:. 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.md is the source of the mesh constitution. The knowledge-base constitution page is derived from it — see playbook 05-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.