The DNA double helix

The frontend architecture the Mzizi registry serves — eight nodes on two backbones, six strands, and four cross-cutting rungs. No axes, no layers, no 3D.

This section documents the Mzizi registry — the shipping component system and design system served at mzizi.dev. It is not documentation for Mzizi-lang, the Phase 0 research language the rest of this site covers. The ecosystem page draws the line between them, and the distinction is load-bearing.

Mzizi’s frontend architecture is a DNA double helix: two entwined backbones — an engineering strand set and a meaning strand set — held together by cross-cutting rungs. Every element in the model carries a type:

type	What it is
node	A functional unit sitting on exactly one strand
strand	A backbone grouping that nodes belong to
rung	A base pair bridging both backbones, bound to no single strand

The model is served, not written down. GET https://mzizi.dev/api/v1/architecture returns the live set, and the tables below are a snapshot of it taken on 11 September 2026 — orientation, not the contract.

curl https://mzizi.dev/api/v1/architecture

The nodes

Eight, all on the engineering backbone today. The component_count column is what the registry held at the time of the snapshot; read the endpoint for the current number.

#	sub_label	Node	Strand	Covenant	Components
N1	tokens	Design tokens	swappable	Design decisions are data, not code.	19
N2	primitive	Primitives	core-guarantee	A primitive does one thing well.	371
N3	brand	Brand components	shipped	A brand component is a primitive with Ubuntu in it.	67
N4	safety	Safety rails	core-guarantee	Nothing harmful reaches the user.	14
N5	resilience	Resilience patterns	core-guarantee	Failure in one part never breaks the whole.	14
N6	pages	Pages	shipped	A page is a composition, not an implementation.	52
N7	shell	Shell	shipped	The shell holds the product.	16
N8	assurance	Assurance	core-guarantee	What breaks is seen before users feel it.	14

The node layout is visible on disk as well as over the API: registry components live under components/registry/n1-tokens/, n2-primitives/, n3-brand/ and so on in mzizi-dev/mzizi-registry.

The rungs

Four. A rung bridges both backbones and belongs to no strand, so strand is null on every one of them.

#	sub_label	Rung	Covenant
N9	fundi	Fundi	Failure is a learning event, not a user-facing incident.
N10	documentation	Documentation	Every document lives here — documents, instructions, docs, documentation. One rung, no exceptions.
N11	discovery	Discovery	If the machine can’t see it, it doesn’t exist.
N12	skills	Skills	What the system knows how to do is teachable, not tribal.

N9 is the self-healing rung: it consumes N8 assurance signals and remediates the root cause. N10 is the single home for anything document-shaped. N11 is the machine-facing surface — preview images, structured data, llms.txt, robots, agent-readiness — and a page with no preview image fails N11 the way an unvalidated input fails N4. N12 holds agent skills, authored in git and projected into the registry.

The strands

Six, three per backbone.

Strand	Backbone	Covenant	Carries
core-guarantee	engineering	The guarantees travel unchanged, always.	Accessibility, data, resilience, observability, safety, primitives
shipped	engineering	In the box, but free to evolve.	Brand, pages, shell — in the box, no permanence promise
swappable	engineering	Fork along the seams, not everywhere.	Tokens, icon library, framework — the only defined fork seams
spine	engineering	What makes the parts one body.	The harness — the pre-wiring that makes strands one framework, not a parts list
genetic-code	meaning	The sequence everything is read from.	Ubuntu principles and Bundu conventions
transcription	meaning	Doctrine is data, not tribal knowledge.	Conventions and decisions as queryable documents

core-guarantee is the load-bearing covenant for adopters: an accessibility layer you can switch off is a suggestion, not a guarantee. swappable is its complement — you fork tokens, icons and framework, and inherit everything else unchanged.

Node numbers are labels, not a sequence

N9 is not “above” N8, and N12 is not the top. The numbers are stable identifiers and nothing more. Two consequences follow:

• Nothing consumes the model in numeric order. A node reads from the strand below it on the same backbone; a rung bridges both and is never imported by a node.
• The node set is not capped. More nodes and rungs get added — N12 is itself newer than much of the prose written about this model. Any code, prompt, schema or sentence that hardcodes an upper bound is wrong the moment the next one lands. Read the endpoint instead.

Rules that follow from the shape

1. A node consumes from the strand below it on the same backbone — never sideways, never upward.
2. Rungs bridge both backbones and are never imported by a node.
3. N1 is the only node allowed to define CSS values. Every other node reads them through var().
4. N6 pages never hardcode a button, card or SVG — a page is pure composition of N2 and N3.
5. N3 destructures { log, motion, LiveRegion } from useNyuchiHarness; N2 never touches the harness.

The retired axis model

There are no axes, no outliers, no 3D and no X/Y/Z. If you find a Mzizi surface — a document, a tool description, a cached page — describing “the horizontal axis”, “the depth dimension”, “ten layers” or “outlier nodes”, you have found retired vocabulary, not a second valid model.

An earlier version of this model described ten ecosystem nodes arranged across five axes (X horizontal, Y vertical, Z depth, plus “outside” and “documentation”). That model is gone. Its API surfaces were retired rather than repaired, and they say so:

Endpoint	Status
GET /api/v1/architecture	200 — the helix
GET /api/v1/architecture/frontend/axes	410 Gone
GET /api/v1/architecture/frontend/layers	410 Gone

Verified 11 September 2026 against production.

Retirement rather than rewiring was a deliberate call, and the reasoning generalises: rewiring an axis_geometry field to return a strand would look correct and teach the wrong model to every consumer downstream. Absence is the correct state here, not repair. The fix for anything axis-shaped is that it stops answering, not that it answers differently.

One consequence worth carrying: a surface can be well-formed and still answer with retired data, and nothing in a schema check will go red. When a tool and this model disagree, the endpoint above is the arbiter.

This is the frontend model

Mzizi also describes a data architecture, with its own vocabulary and its own numbering. They are different models. Never conflate the two, and never quote a count from one while describing the other.