Introduction

Every organization has rules. Most keep them in a wiki nobody reads, written for humans and ignored by the automation that does the work. Cogitave keeps its rules in one file, in the root of the estate, addressed to both the people and the agents that change it.

That file is AGENTS.md. It is the managed policy: every coding and automation agent - and every human in a session - reads the nearest AGENTS.md, and the root file is the floor that all sub-trees inherit. It opens with a section titled "Non-negotiable rules (the floor)" and lists seven of them.

Why a floor at all

You are working inside a control plane. Treat every change as auditable evidence: a reviewer or an auditor will read your diff. A floor that both a person and an agent can read is what lets a narrow, cheap model act unattended and still stay correct - the environment carries the rules, so they hold whether the author was human or not.

Each rule also delegates to an owning standard for the detail. AGENTS.md is deliberately short; it states the rule and points you at the canonical document under standards/docs/standards/. Learn the floor from AGENTS.md; learn the specifics from the standard it cites. Never paraphrase a rule from memory when the source is one link away.

What you will get from this module

Not a tour of opinions - a working command of seven rules you can state, a clear picture of what enforces each one (a hook, a CI gate, an org ruleset, or policy-as-code), and the ability to apply all seven to your very first change.