Monad: Subtractive Synthesis

In audio synthesis, subtractive synthesis starts with a rich source signal and removes what you don’t need — the output is defined by what remains after filtering, not by building up from scratch.

Monad routing works the same way.

The model

A namespace like suis-macbook-air.local is not a single process. It is a surface — potentially many monad Express instances running at different ports, each handling a slice of the workload:

suis-macbook-air.local
  monad:cleaker   → port 4101  (healthy)
  monad:netget    → port 4102  (healthy)
  monad:cold-store           (sleeping)

Netget does not know which monad to route to in advance. Instead, it holds all registered entries for that namespace and subtracts the ones that are unfit:

all registered monads for namespace
  − expired entries (TTL elapsed, heartbeat stopped)
  − unhealthy entries (health check failing)
  ─────────────────────────────────────────────
  → route to the highest-scored remaining monad

The scoring (meshSelect.ts) weighs lastSeenMs, health state, and capability flags. The winner gets the proxied request.

Why this matters

• The namespace is stable even as individual monads restart, crash, or scale.
• No central coordinator decides what’s alive — each monad declares itself alive by sending heartbeats. Silence means absence.
• New monads join by registering. Old ones leave by going silent. The surface reshapes itself continuously.

This is the opposite of additive: you don’t build the namespace by enumerating every piece. You start with everything that has announced itself and cut away what’s gone.

Relation to the Monad bubble

The Monad component’s healthy prop reflects the synthesized output of this process — it is true when at least one monad in the mesh remains after filtering, false when all have been subtracted away, and null when no entries have ever arrived.

The orb does not represent one process. It represents whether the surface is alive.