Address as Identity
Abstract. Bees cannot find a hive moved five feet. Honey is brought home and managed by bees, not by the beekeeper. Hives get cut down. Those three observations are one: the hive lives at a place, maintains itself, and can die — provided its books live in a deeper substrate. Here the soul is git; the body is allowed to be mortal.
1. Address-as-identity
Real foragers navigate by landmarks and the sun. Move the box a few feet and they return to the old coordinates and die there. They do not search.
Design implication: the substrate path is part of identity, not a configuration value. Workers are dispatched with ~/autonomy/.swarm/ baked in. They do not re-resolve it. If a human mvs the hive at runtime, every in-flight worker is orphaned. To move a hive you do not move files — you swarm. Configurability that helps a stateless service is catastrophic for a running colony.
2. Honey is managed by bees
Foragers bring nectar. House bees receive it, process it, store it, build comb, ventilate, clean, tend the queen, guard the entrance. Neither class is an external manager.
Substrate maintenance is therefore worker work, not loop-runtime work. The audit loop raises flags. Ventilators sweep stale locks. Archivists commit the metalog. Scouts emit new scope manifests. The orchestrator authors charters and resolves exceptions. Housekeeping bees do the rest.
| Class | Role | Touches |
|---|---|---|
| Forager | porter, parity_fixer, doc_writer, auditor | project trees; auditor is read-only |
| House bee | comb-builder, ventilator, archivist, scout | .swarm/beliefs, locks, audits, open scopes |
3. Hives can be cut down
Body: tmpfs logs, locks, in-flight workers, the SQLite mirror. Mortal, tied to a physical address. Soul: git history of docs, charters, metalog, beliefs, role definitions, every worker commit. Location-independent. When the body dies, bootstrap from git rebuilds it. There is no WAL of unflushed events. There is only body and soul.
The unrecoverable scenario is deletion of the git repo with no remote — the chainsaw. git push is therefore a real responsibility, not optional hygiene.
4. One observation, three angles
The hive is a living thing that lives at a place, maintains itself by its own labor, and can die. If it has been keeping its books in git, the colony can come back from those books. In-flight work dies with the body; the charter that produced it does not.
Source report. Summarized from docs/HIVE-BIOLOGY.md in the hive tree. This page is the paper. The report remains the primary.