This directory holds the rules **ops-warden owns** — the decisions this repo made,
is bound by, and is responsible for changing.
## Why these exist as ADRs rather than wiki prose
Until 2026-08-18 every rule in this list lived in wiki prose, a workplan, or a
comment at the top of `registry/routing/catalog.yaml`. All of them were being
followed. None of them was *addressable*: a reader outside ops-warden could not
cite one, could not tell whether it was current, and could not tell whether it
was ours to change or someone else's that we merely obey.
That distinction is the point of this directory. It matters in both directions:
- **A rule we own, mistaken for inherited canon, never gets fixed.** We wait for
an owner who does not exist.
- **Inherited canon, mistaken for ours, gets quietly bent.** We change something
we had no authority over, and the drift is invisible until it breaks a repo
that trusted the canonical version.
## Owned versus inherited
Every ADR here carries `owner:` in its frontmatter. It is the load-bearing field.
| `owner:` | Meaning | How it changes |
| --- | --- | --- |
| `ops-warden` | **Ours.** We decided it, we are bound by it, and we may change it | A new ADR that supersedes this one. Never an edit-in-place that rewrites a decision |
| anything else | **Inherited.** We follow it; we do not own it | Through that owner's process. We may dispute it — we may not amend it |
Everything currently in this directory is `owner: ops-warden`. Rules we follow but
do not own — NetKingdom canon, the IAM profile, the credential-management standard
— are *not* copied here. They are cited. Copying inherited canon into our own ADR
directory would recreate exactly the second-source-of-truth failure that
`ADR-0001` exists to prevent.
## Superseding one of these
A decision here changed the behaviour of other repos, so retracting it silently is
not available. Write a new ADR, set the old one's `status: superseded` and
`successor:`, and leave it in place. Superseded is a lifecycle state; deletion is
not. `policy-nexus` publishes the history, and a reader asking "what did this say
when we made that decision" must be able to find out.
## Relationship to `.claude/rules/`
`.claude/rules/*.md` are **agent-facing operational instructions**. They tell an
agent what to do in a session. They are derived from these ADRs and should cite
them rather than restate the reasoning. If the two disagree, the ADR is right and
the rule file is a defect.
## Publication
These are publishable through `policy-nexus` at `policy.coulomb.social`, which
requires `title`, `status` and `owner` on every document and renders Owner as a
column in its index. The ownership knowledge therefore survives publication
rather than being a local convention that evaporates at the repo boundary.
`policy-nexus` publishes; it never writes back. The file in this directory is the
source of truth. If the site and this directory disagree, this directory is right
and the publication is a defect.
| ADR | Rule | Binds |
| --- | --- | --- |
| `ADR-0001` | The routing catalog is a pointer layer, never a second copy of an owner's procedure | ops-warden, and every repo contributing a catalog entry |
| `ADR-0002` | ops-warden is a transparent conduit, never a secret broker | ops-warden |
| `ADR-0003` | Cover gaps, but never silently own them | ops-warden |
| `ADR-0004` | High-risk lanes refuse raw value streaming to agent sessions | ops-warden, and any agent runtime calling `warden access` |
| `ADR-0005` | Implement one lane narrowly, route everything else | ops-warden |
| `ADR-0010` | ops-warden is Staff: it owns access lanes, never access rules; the direct OpenBao client is a declared engine gap | ops-warden, and gate-house as the standard's owner |
