documents do not run on the same clock as machines

One repository held the record of decisions, the sequence that acts on them, the bootstrap that prepares a blank machine, and the definitions of the machines themselves. Nothing was wrong with it. It was organised by ownership, which put four things with four different clocks into one history.

A decision is amended when someone's thinking changes, which can be twice in an afternoon and then not for months. A sequence changes when a failure teaches something. A bootstrap changes when a machine generation changes. The definitions change when hardware is replaced. Together the fastest clock sets the noise floor for all of them: a reader of the decision record is scrolling past machine repairs to find the reasoning, and a review of a reasoning change carries an unrelated hardware edit alongside it.

The split was drawn on those clocks. Decisions, live status, the plan, the open questions and the operational handbook in one place. The ordered stages of the build-and-deploy sequence in a second. The bootstrap in a third. Only declarative definitions of the running estate in the fourth, which is the one that had been the repository.

The cost is that a change crossing a boundary is now several changes in several places, and their consistency is somebody's discipline rather than a machine's check. A document is also no longer adjacent to the code it describes, which readers notice immediately.

What it proves is that the repository boundary was drawn on rate of change rather than on ownership, which is the boundary that survives being reorganised twice.