tegwick
35aff380a3
Five rules that governed this repo lived in wiki prose, a workplan, and a comment at the top of catalog.yaml. All were followed; none was addressable. A reader outside ops-warden could not cite one, could not tell whether it was current, and — the point of this change — could not tell whether it was ours to change or someone else's that we merely obey. ADR-0001 The routing catalog is a pointer layer, never a second copy ADR-0002 ops-warden is a transparent conduit, never a secret broker ADR-0003 Cover gaps, but never silently own them ADR-0004 High-risk lanes refuse raw value streaming to agent sessions ADR-0005 Implement one lane narrowly, route everything else Each carries owner: ops-warden, which is the load-bearing field. It says we follow the rule AND we are responsible for changing it — by superseding ADR, never an in-place edit. The failure this prevents runs both ways: a rule we own mistaken for inherited canon never gets fixed, because we wait for an owner who does not exist; inherited canon mistaken for ours gets quietly bent, and the drift is invisible until it breaks a repo that trusted the canonical version. Rules we follow but do not own — NetKingdom canon, the IAM profile, the credential-management standard, the-custodian's ADR-001 workplan convention — are cited, never copied into docs/adr/. Copying them would recreate exactly the second-source-of-truth failure ADR-0001 exists to prevent. architecture.md also now flags the three-digit/four-digit ADR-001 vs ADR-0001 collision, which is itself an ours-versus-inherited confusion waiting to happen. Publication verified rather than assumed: all five render through policy-nexus tools/render.py, and owner reaches the reader in three places — the page eyebrow (render.py:346), the index Owner column (build_site.py:123,137), and the publication manifest. build_site.py:179 makes title/status/owner required, so ownership cannot be dropped on the way out. policy-nexus publishes and never writes back; docs/adr/ stays the source of truth. Documentation adapted: SCOPE.md gains a Governing rules section and an orientation entry; .claude/rules/architecture.md replaced its stub with the ADR index, the owned-versus-inherited rule, and ADR-over-wiki precedence; finding-routing.md's ADR-gap section closed; catalog.yaml's no-double-source header now cites ADR-0001 rather than the originating workplan. uv run pytest -q → 338 passed, 4 deselected. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
69 lines
3.6 KiB
Markdown
69 lines
3.6 KiB
Markdown
# ops-warden architecture decision records
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This directory holds the rules **ops-warden owns** — the decisions this repo made,
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is bound by, and is responsible for changing.
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## Why these exist as ADRs rather than wiki prose
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Until 2026-08-18 every rule in this list lived in wiki prose, a workplan, or a
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comment at the top of `registry/routing/catalog.yaml`. All of them were being
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followed. None of them was *addressable*: a reader outside ops-warden could not
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cite one, could not tell whether it was current, and could not tell whether it
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was ours to change or someone else's that we merely obey.
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That distinction is the point of this directory. It matters in both directions:
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- **A rule we own, mistaken for inherited canon, never gets fixed.** We wait for
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an owner who does not exist.
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- **Inherited canon, mistaken for ours, gets quietly bent.** We change something
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we had no authority over, and the drift is invisible until it breaks a repo
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that trusted the canonical version.
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## Owned versus inherited
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Every ADR here carries `owner:` in its frontmatter. It is the load-bearing field.
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| `owner:` | Meaning | How it changes |
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| --- | --- | --- |
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| `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 |
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| 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 |
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Everything currently in this directory is `owner: ops-warden`. Rules we follow but
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do not own — NetKingdom canon, the IAM profile, the credential-management standard
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— are *not* copied here. They are cited. Copying inherited canon into our own ADR
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directory would recreate exactly the second-source-of-truth failure that
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`ADR-0001` exists to prevent.
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## Superseding one of these
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A decision here changed the behaviour of other repos, so retracting it silently is
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not available. Write a new ADR, set the old one's `status: superseded` and
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`successor:`, and leave it in place. Superseded is a lifecycle state; deletion is
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not. `policy-nexus` publishes the history, and a reader asking "what did this say
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when we made that decision" must be able to find out.
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## Relationship to `.claude/rules/`
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`.claude/rules/*.md` are **agent-facing operational instructions**. They tell an
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agent what to do in a session. They are derived from these ADRs and should cite
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them rather than restate the reasoning. If the two disagree, the ADR is right and
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the rule file is a defect.
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## Publication
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These are publishable through `policy-nexus` at `policy.coulomb.social`, which
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requires `title`, `status` and `owner` on every document and renders Owner as a
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column in its index. The ownership knowledge therefore survives publication
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rather than being a local convention that evaporates at the repo boundary.
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`policy-nexus` publishes; it never writes back. The file in this directory is the
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source of truth. If the site and this directory disagree, this directory is right
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and the publication is a defect.
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| ADR | Rule | Binds |
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| --- | --- | --- |
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| `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 |
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| `ADR-0002` | ops-warden is a transparent conduit, never a secret broker | ops-warden |
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| `ADR-0003` | Cover gaps, but never silently own them | ops-warden |
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| `ADR-0004` | High-risk lanes refuse raw value streaming to agent sessions | ops-warden, and any agent runtime calling `warden access` |
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| `ADR-0005` | Implement one lane narrowly, route everything else | ops-warden |
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