Decision 144: `gateway` names the ingress process; decision-059's gateway is the auth proxy in front of it

Status: proposed (the owner decides at the PR)
Date: 2026-10-19
Deciders: MadaraUchiha-314 (the ask, the requirements and design gates), the-loop (design)
Work item: issue-496
Spec: docs/specs/issue-496/design.md §Overview, §Trade-offs

Context

the-loop already uses the word gateway once. Decision-059 removed in-app authentication from the control-plane service and said "a gateway owns auth": an auth-terminating reverse proxy an operator puts in front of the service when exposing it. Issue-496 adds a process the author named the gateway too: one ingress for a fleet — the webhooks, the one Slack Socket Mode connection per app, the pollers — that stores every event and fans it out to the instances' queues. Two readings of one word, both in the record, would send a reader of either decision to the wrong component.

Decision

gateway, unqualified, is the ingress process of issue-496: the-loop gateway start|stop|status|restart|subjects|instances, gateway-config.yaml, gateway-config.schema.json, the gateway block of an instance's CLI config, the gateway.* event family, the the_loop.gateway package and the the-loop-gateway.v1.yaml contract.
Decision-059's gateway is the auth-terminating gateway — always written with that qualifier from now on, in docs and in code comments. It is a deployment's reverse proxy, not a the-loop process, and it may sit in front of the control-plane service and in front of an exposed the-loop gateway alike.
The two are orthogonal: the ingress gateway carries no authentication of its own (decision-146) and expects the auth-terminating gateway, or the network boundary, to provide it.

Consequences

One word, two components, disambiguated by a qualifier rather than by renaming either: decision-059's text keeps reading as written, and the author's name for the new process stands.
Every new page and record uses the unqualified word for the process; a reference to the proxy says auth-terminating gateway and links decision-059.

Alternatives considered

Rename the ingress process (relay, hub, broker) — the author named it, every ticket comment and the requirements use the name, and broker would wrongly promise Kafka-like semantics the design deliberately does not offer (one process, SQLite).
Rename decision-059's gateway retroactively — rewriting an accepted record to make room for a new one inverts the record's purpose.