Trellis
Trellis is a computer that manages itself with me — a NixOS workstation where every change is deliberate, reversible, and written down.
Most computers accumulate. Trellis is the opposite: the whole operating system is declared as code, the disk wipes itself clean on every reboot, and the only things that survive are the ones I explicitly chose to keep. If something breaks, a reboot is a recovery tool. Nothing drifts.
I co-manage it with an AI agent (Claude) inside a set of hard rules the agent cannot escape. Every meaningful decision the system has ever made is recorded as an Architecture Decision Record — the reasoning, not just the result — so the “why” is never lost.
This wiki is a curated window onto that record.
The ideas that define it
- Impermanence — the root filesystem is tmpfs; it resets to the declared state on every boot. Only an explicit “persist set” survives. (ADR-0003)
- One real configuration — no decoy split, no drift; the source is the system. (ADR-0002)
- The tier flow — changes move through mortal experiments, to committed and built, to a reviewed pull request, before they become permanent. (ADR-0009)
- An authentic desktop — a faithful port of the Omarchy environment. (ADR-0005)
- A single work surface — every task lives on one board. (ADR-0016)
How it began, and where it’s going
- ADR-0001 — one-shot synthesis — the origin: how trellis was synthesized in a single pass from three inputs.
- ADR-0017 — the chromium substrate — a recent decision, showing the system still evolving by the same rules.
Browse the decisions in the sidebar. Each one is the real reasoning, preserved.