The naming rules

The naming standard opens with cross-cutting principles that apply in every context, then pins concrete conventions per language and per domain. Learn the principles; they explain the conventions.

The principles that decide most names

• Consistency over preference. Pick one convention per context and lint it; uniformity beats any single "best" casing.
• No stutter. Never repeat the namespace, package, or type in a member name - bufio.Reader, not bufio.BufReader.
• No redundant prefix. The hierarchy already disambiguates, so drop the cogitave- echo inside a cogitave/ namespace. The exception is a flat global namespace where a prefix avoids collision - COG_ env vars, com.cogitave.* event types, cogitave: tag keys.
• Casing by role, not habit. UpperCamelCase, snake_case, and SCREAMING_SNAKE_CASE are assigned by an identifier's role in each language.
• Immutable IDs; mutable facts in metadata. Bake only permanent attributes into a name. Environment, owner, and cost go in tags and labels - never the name.
• Machine-enforceable. Every rule maps to a linter or policy gate.

Naming the things you will touch first

Repos. Plain, lowercase kebab-case keywords - bootstrap, core, standards, agents, infra. No redundant cogitave- prefix: the org already provides the namespace. A product family takes its own prefix as it grows (yuva-sdk, namzu-runtime). Tiers such as self, public, and internal are estate.yaml metadata values, never folders or repo names - do not name a repo internal or public.

UIDs. Dotted, immutable, globally unique - cogitave.<area>.<slug>. A doc's URL may change; the UID never does.

Code identifiers. Cased by role in each language: Rust uses snake_case for functions and UpperCamelCase for types, with acronyms as one word (Uuid, Http, Mcp); Go uses MixedCaps and keeps initialisms uniform (ID, URL, ServeHTTP, never Url/Id); TypeScript uses PascalCase types and camelCase values with no I-prefix on interfaces.

Files. TypeScript files are kebab-case (mcp-client.ts) with PascalCase symbols inside; Rust files are snake_case.rs where file equals module. Repo-root markers are UPPERCASE (README.md, LICENSE, CHANGELOG.md, CODEOWNERS).

Branches. type/ISSUE-ID-kebab-description, lowercase, a single /, the type drawn from the Conventional Commits vocabulary - for example feat/COG-417-mcp-stream-cancel. The commit and version semantics behind that type are owned by commits-versioning.