jschoubben
92e8c74ce4
Building tier 0 forced the question "the one binary installed by hand" had been carrying unexamined. A TypeScript host needs a runtime present before it runs, so the thing installed by hand becomes two — and the second must be installed by the means the host exists to replace. So the host is a statically linked binary that requires nothing present, written in Go. Rejected: a runtime installed first, which breaks the property the tier rests on; and bundling the runtime into the executable, which carries ninety megabytes to preserve a language choice and puts a young feature at the bottom of the stack. The argument that decided it is architectural rather than about taste. 0037 means the host never queries the mesh database and 0039 means it only receives declarations, so the host shares NO code with any other tier — not a client, not a schema, not the SDK. The language boundary falls exactly on a boundary that already exists, and a second language usually costs duplicated logic where here there is none to duplicate. §8 gains a scope: it said "TypeScript throughout" when everything was a service or a surface, and is now scoped to those with tier 0 named. Another sync owed. Playbook 04 steps 2 and 4: repos.md records mesh-host as existing, the design takes code: [mesh-host] and status: in-progress.
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status, updated
| status | updated |
|---|---|
| canonical | 2026-08-23 |
The Novox repositories
The map of where implementation lives. Humans use it for orientation; agents use it for issue
triage (playbook process/03-issues.md). The code: frontmatter
field in design documents points at entries here.
Repository names are recorded; hosts, URLs and owners are not — this repository is public,
and a forge address is an operational detail (see README).
| Repository | Owns |
|---|---|
hal |
The monorepo — the node runtime, the module catalogue, the delivery machinery, and the bootstrap scripts. Every core module lives here. |
hq |
This repository, under the company organisation — mission, research, design, decisions, issue diagnosis. Company-scoped (ADR 0028); the mesh is its first product. The source of truth for why. Carries no implementation. |
| (one per application) | Every standalone application, site or side-project gets its own repository, with module.yml at the root. Registered with the mesh as a build source; built and deployed by the same pipeline as anything in the monorepo. |
What the mesh becomes
ADR 0030 records the repositories the
monorepo decomposes into. mesh-lab and mesh-host exist so far — the lab is built first
(ADR 0029); the rest are the
target, not the present.
| Repository | Tier | Holds |
|---|---|---|
mesh-host |
0 | exists. The node host — one statically linked binary, requiring nothing present (ADR 0041) |
mesh-substrate |
1 | the four pinned services, as declarations |
mesh-control |
2 | the control plane and its contexts |
mesh-surfaces |
3 | tools, web, cli |
mesh-sdk |
— | contracts shared across tiers |
mesh-lab |
— | exists. The lab — scenario lifecycle, networking, placement. Ships to nobody; runs on a workstation. |
Tier 4's shape is open, and deliberately so: see ADR 0030 and research 005.
What lives where inside the monorepo
Named by role, because the layout is itself part of the as-is design — see
03-DESIGN/00-as-is/.
| Area | Holds |
|---|---|
| Module catalogue | One directory per module, each with a manifest. Core modules sit under the mesh's own namespace; everything else at the top level. |
| Node runtime | The daemon and interactive runtime that every node runs. |
| Bootstrap scripts | First-node initialisation, joining an existing mesh, and node rescue. |
| Shared library | The SDK every module builds against. |
| Pipeline test harness | End-to-end coverage of the delivery pipeline. Currently unbuildable — see 04-ISSUES/005. |
Why applications do not live in the monorepo
A standalone application in the monorepo is a convention violation, and reviewers reject it.
The reasoning is recorded in 02-DECISIONS/0010:
the mesh installs, provisions for, and ships an application through exactly the same machinery
whether or not its source sits beside the mesh's own — so co-location buys nothing and costs
the monorepo's review cadence.
There is no npm workspace
Each module is a standalone package that consumes its dependencies from the private registry,
not from a sibling directory. The workspace was removed after it caused build-versus-development
divergence — a workspace member importing another resolved to local unbuilt source in the
pipeline and to a published version in development. Recorded in
02-DECISIONS/0007.
Consequence, and it is a real one: a cross-package change is two steps — publish, then consume
— and a repository-wide npm install does not exist.