jochen
dbe100ca96
Seats have been doing two jobs and neither is written down. The mechanism ADR 0009 introduced is enforced — a second holder is refused — but any well-formed name becomes a seat by being claimed, and nothing can say which seats a mesh has or who holds them: holdings are assembled while planning and discarded. The enumeration done while preparing this missed the control plane's own manifest, because core modules' manifests live in its repository rather than the catalogue. 0110 closes the set. Each seat has a name, a scope, what occupying it delivers, and the record that made it one; a claim outside the set is refused. A seat is held by a module assignment, and what the mesh knows about the holder is what it knows about that assignment — nothing is stored beside it. A seat may deliver a provision, and then its holder answers for it among several providers: pin, then the holder, then the only provider, then refused. That keeps 0009's "refused, never guessed": the seat is the choice made once, mesh-wide, instead of a pin per consumer node. The first set is the eleven seats already claimed plus 0109's npm-package-registry, so nothing in use is refused. Two concepts — seats for exclusion, a new word for consumable singulars — was rejected: both mean "this mesh's one X", and the overview a person wants is one list. 0111 gives the mesh a git seat and makes a build source one of two explicit forms: a repository on the seat's holder, recorded by its path and cloned from wherever the holder runs at build time; or an external URL, recorded and cloned exactly as given. Recognising self-hosted sources by matching URLs against the forge's address was rejected — it fails in the one case it exists for, after the forge moves. Credentials for private repositories are left undecided and said so. Design: new to-be 26 (the seats); 23 gains the seat step in resolution; 18's source entry names the two forms; the glossary's seat and provision entries say where they meet. 0109 is carried from its own branch so every link here resolves.
00-META
The northern star. What the mesh is, the environment it runs in, and what changes when it works — plus the engineering practice that holds across everything Novox builds. Every research effort and design decision is checked against this folder.
| File / folder | Purpose |
|---|---|
mission.md |
Vision, mission, and the values that decide arguments |
context.md |
The environment — conditions, not aspirations |
effect.md |
What is different when the work is done |
how-we-build.md |
The rules that hold across the mesh, each one earned. The source of the mesh constitution — the governed page the mesh injects into design sessions is derived from it. |
glossary.md |
One name per thing — the authority on vocabulary, and the words that were retired |
repos.md |
Where implementation lives, and what each repository owns |
process/ |
The playbooks — how work moves through this repository, for engineers and agents alike |
Rules
- Markdown only.
- Stable by nature. Changes here reflect a genuine shift in intent, not iteration. The one
exception is
how-we-build.md, which changes whenever a rule is earned — and only through its amendment process. - Research and design must be traceable back to what is written here.
- Instance-agnostic. These documents describe the mesh as a concept. No machine names, no counts, no topology.
On the architecture overview in the code repository
The code repository carries an architecture overview predating this folder. It is a useful
description of how the mesh works, and its content now lives — anonymised and checked against
the implementation — in 03-DESIGN/00-as-is/. GENESIS answers why;
that document answered how, which is the design layer's job.
It had also drifted from the implementation in ways worth recording, since both were found by comparing it against the code rather than by anyone noticing:
- It described the pipeline as having a separate builder process and a build stage that packages. Neither was true after 2026-08-04; the documents stayed stale until 2026-08-06 (ADR 0010).
- It listed the mesh as spanning a fixed number of named machines, which is exactly the content this repository cannot carry.
It also lists "symlinks, not copies" as a key design principle, and that is a genuine contradiction rather than a stale detail. The mesh's stated intent is that it creates no symlinks at all — the rule is not merely "only the installer may link", and a founding document elevating linking to a principle points the opposite way from where this is going.
What exists today is that the installer owns and reconciles every link
(ADR 0012) — an as-is fact, recorded in
03-DESIGN/00-as-is/05-runtime-and-installation.md.
Centralising who may link narrowed the incident class; it did not close it. The intent is to
remove the mechanism, recorded as ADR 0012.
A founding document contradicting the direction of travel is precisely the failure this folder exists to prevent.