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Publish the design documents as docs/design/ - #103

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Jason-Vaughan merged 2 commits into
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docs/design-curation
Aug 16, 2026
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Publish the design documents as docs/design/#103
Jason-Vaughan merged 2 commits into
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docs/design-curation

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What

Publishes eight design documents as docs/design/, linked from README.md and CONTRIBUTING.md:

Document Canonical for
architecture.md Process topology — what runs separately, what breaks between them
api-contract.md The four surfaces (HTTP, MCP, CLI, GUI) and what each promises
data-model.md Every entity, where it lives, what survives a crash
security-model.md What is protected, from whom, what each control buys
boundaries.md Contract surfaces you cannot quietly change
observability.md The one signal, and what it cannot answer
nonfunctional-requirements.md Performance, reliability, cost, compatibility targets
operations.md Install, configure, diagnose, recover, release

CONTRIBUTING.md gains a parity line: changes to routing, adapters, or either HTTP surface should
update the matching document in the same PR.

Why

This reasoning existed but was kept local, so the repo showed what the router does and never why
it is shaped that way. That is exactly the material someone needs to evaluate whether to depend on
TangleBrain, or to find somewhere to start contributing.

The documents keep their candor. They name the project's weaknesses plainly — that the bind
address is the entire access control story, that budget_usd_month is a declaration rather than an
enforcement, that no test guards the loopback bind. Every gap they name now has a tracking issue, so
each admission arrives with a fix path instead of standing as an unactionable weakness:

Filed alongside them, from designing a multi-backend coordination setup:

Test plan

  • make test — 495 tests, green (17 skipped, the opt-in live suite).
  • No production code changed; this is documentation plus two doc-link edits.
  • Verified every relative link in docs/design/ resolves to an existing file.
  • Swept the curated text for machine paths, personal identifiers, cross-project references, and
    credential-shaped strings — clean.

Eight documents covering runtime architecture, the four API contract
surfaces, the data model, the security model, contract boundaries,
observability, nonfunctional requirements, and operations, plus an index.

These were written against the real code and had been kept local. The
reasoning is what a contributor needs and the code alone does not carry:
which surfaces cannot be changed in lockstep with their consumers, what
survives a crash, what each security control actually buys, and where
the project is currently weak.

They keep their candor. Every gap they name now has a tracking issue
(#92, #95-#102), so each admission arrives with a fix path rather than
standing as an unactionable weakness.

README.md and CONTRIBUTING.md link the set; CONTRIBUTING.md asks that
changes to routing, adapters, or either HTTP surface update the matching
document in the same PR.
@Jason-Vaughan
Jason-Vaughan enabled auto-merge (squash) August 16, 2026 21:15
@Jason-Vaughan
Jason-Vaughan merged commit 12f5035 into main Aug 16, 2026
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@Jason-Vaughan
Jason-Vaughan deleted the docs/design-curation branch August 16, 2026 21:16
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