Use MQTT as the device transport
Device state and commands move over a broker rather than over HTTP request/response between the platform and each device.
Faculty II · Records
Memory
Code records what a system does, precisely. Almost nothing records why. That knowledge lives in one head with a half-life of about a quarter, and after that the honest answer to "why is this like this?" becomes "I don't remember."
Rule Records are never rewritten. Superseding is what turns documents into history.
Lost rationale doesn't cause outages. It causes worse.
Someone sees a constraint that looks arbitrary, can't find a reason for it, reasonably assumes there isn't one, and removes it. The original problem returns weeks later in a form nobody connects to the change. That constraint was load-bearing and nothing said so.
The inverse costs just as much. A constraint that genuinely was arbitrary survives for years because nobody dares touch it, and the system accumulates rules obeyed out of superstition.
The shape of a record
- Context The forces in play at the time — constraints, requirements, what was and wasn't known.
- Decision What was chosen, stated plainly and in the active voice.
- Alternatives What else was considered and why it lost. The section that stops a decision being relitigated.
- Consequences What follows, including the bad parts. A record listing only benefits is marketing.
The records
Every decision here is scoped to Argus and Nexus — why the transport is a broker, why there is one door, why records live in the platform.
Record list
Run platform services as composed containers on a single host
Docker Compose on one Linux host rather than a container orchestrator, for as long as the workload genuinely fits.
Terminate TLS at a single reverse proxy
One ingress point holds TLS, security headers, and the authentication boundary. Services publish no host ports.
Store decisions as records inside the platform
Records are first-class platform data rather than files in a repository, because the assistant that reads and drafts them needs somewhere to look.
Prove Argus on engineering work before generalising it
Argus is designed as a general assistant but is being built against infrastructure work first, because that is the hardest case rather than the only one.
Argus drafts. It does not assert.
A record the assistant writes lands as proposed, attributed to the assistant, and stays that way until a person accepts it. That constraint is not a safety gesture bolted on afterwards — it is the reason the store is trustworthy at all. An assistant that can quietly author authoritative history is worse than no assistant.
Every record on this page was written by hand, in the shape the store will take. The store itself is proposed, not built.
Records are only half of it. The other half is being able to ask.
Voice