How it is organised inside
Four rooms, one house
Inside the big machines, the work is split into four rooms. Each room does one kind of job, has its own set of keys, and can be shut, copied, and restarted on its own. The reason is not tidiness — it is that when one room floods, the rest of the house keeps living.
The proper term is a container: a program running in its own box, with its own address, its own files, and its own keys. It shares the machine, but not the mess. We call them rooms, because that is the shape of it.
01The four rooms
Genkan · 玄関 — the entrance hall
The front door. One login, the padlock, the guard, and the status page. It has exactly two public doors, and it is the only door anyone walks through from outside.
Why it gets its own room: it is the thing you touch least and the thing that must never be down. A media restart must never take your logins with it.
Planned
Tamashii · たましい — the soul
The library and the living room. Films, music, audiobooks, the television, the shelf of everything we own, and the front desk that answers “what is on?”.
Why it gets its own room: it is the biggest room, the loudest, and the one you use every evening. It is allowed to be restarted without taking the house down.
The film shelf is liveThe rest of the room: planned
Yuma · ゆうげん — deep, quiet evening beauty
The playroom. The AI helpers, the story corner, the voice machine, the game panel, and the agent coordinator that does chores — with its budgets and its kill switch fitted on the day it is switched on.
Why it gets its own room: it is the experimental room. Experiments must not be able to reach the films.
In testingMostly planned
Tsudoi · つどい — a gathering
The mailroom. The finders, the sorters, the fetchers — the machinery behind “ask for a film and it appears”. It has a hard disk allowance and a private route out.
Why it gets its own room: it is the room most likely to fill the disk. A room that can only fill its own allowance cannot take the house down.
Planned
02What the rooms buy you
One room can break
A failed experiment in the playroom cannot take the television down. A media restart cannot log you out of the front door.
Each room has its own keys
The download room does not get the keys to the padlock. The AI helpers do not get the keys to the bank. Least privilege, in house words: give a job the smallest set of keys that lets it work.
Each room can be copied
A room’s settings can be photographed and restored in minutes. That is the difference between an evening’s annoyance and a weekend.
03The door rule
What is open, in one paragraph
Exactly one machine faces the outside world, and it has exactly two doors open: the web, and the padlock. The games machine keeps its game doors open, because a game server you cannot join is not much use. Everything else in the house has no public door at all. That is the whole list — and the fact that it fits in a paragraph is the test we hold ourselves to.
“Public address” is not “open door”
Two of our machines have public internet addresses, and that sounds alarming. It is not, on its own. A machine with a public address and every door shut is quiet. The door is the thing that matters, not the address — so every service is checked from outside the house, from the outside, before we call it done.
Every exception to a rule gets written down with a reason next to it. “The games machine keeps its game doors open” is an exception, and it is on the list on purpose. A rule with no written exceptions is a rule nobody checked.