Reuse first - discover before you build
Inheriting the ruleset is only half of staying on the paved road. The other half is a habit: discover before you build. Before you write a service, an endpoint, a background job, or a UI component, you look for how Cogitave already does it — and start from that.
The patterns catalog is where you look. It is the machine-queryable index of "how do I do X the Cogitave way?", and it exists precisely so that an agent or a person discovers before generating. Building from scratch is the exception that must be justified, not the default.
What a catalog entry is — and is not
The catalog does not invent policy and it does not restate standards. Each entry is a thin, honest pointer with the same five sections:
| Section | What it tells you |
|---|---|
| Problem | when to reach for this pattern |
| The Cogitave way | the one canonical solution, concretely |
| Governing standard(s) | the authority — the rules live there, not in the entry |
| Reusable artifact | the template, primitive, or snippet you start from |
| Anti-pattern | what agents most often wrongly generate instead |
The authority always lives in the standard; the catalog only tells you which door to walk through.
The four-step loop
- Query before you generate. Every pattern is a node reachable over MCP. Ask for the task ("add an HTTP endpoint", "emit a domain event") before writing any code.
- Read the entry, follow the two links — its governing standard (the rules you must obey) and its reusable artifact (the code you start from).
- Start from the artifact, not a blank file. Scaffold from the named template, extend the named primitive, or copy the named snippet. A repo born from a template already inherits the floor, the standards, the lifecycle, and the identity.
- If you must go off-road, own it. Deviating is allowed, but it is a decision with a cost: you record the rationale (an ADR or a lifecycle evaluate note), you own the maintenance, and you still satisfy the Definition of Done.
TIP
The rule of thumb for anything new: query the catalog, compose from the named artifact, and only author new after a recorded "no fit" — then contribute the new pattern back, so the next project finds it. An industrial-standard solution that stops at the catalog becomes our standard.
This is the concrete enactment of the reuse-first, discover-before-generate rule the always-on standards inherit. Reuse over regeneration is not a preference here; it is the inherited default.