Summary

You saw that a Cogitave repo never has to ask "what are the rules here?" — it is born on the paved road with its complete ruleset already inherited.

In this module, you:

• Learned that a repo inherits along distinct planes — the floor, the standards, the scaffold, the lifecycle and Definition of Done, and the identity — each with its own mechanism, stated once in the project baseline.
• Saw the floor is inherited for free and a leaf AGENTS.md can only add, never restate or override it.
• Distinguished always-on standards from the conditional standards a product type pulls in — for example, a service signing the product-core-baseline contract.
• Learned that the scaffold bakes it in from birth: a repo is copied from templates/base plus its per-type template, so the toolchain, quality gate, and CI are present from the first commit.
• Adopted discover before you build: query the patterns catalog, start from the named artifact, and only author new after a recorded "no fit" — then contribute it back.

Remember the Day-0 honesty: these mechanisms are authored specs and scaffolds today; the gates become enforced at cutover. What is real now is the contract.

Next steps

Where you go next depends on your path:

• Contributor onboarding → Work the request lifecycle - walk a change through the 7-stage lifecycle and Definition of Done you met here.
• Patterns and golden paths → Use the decision guides - walk a technology-selection decision guide to a justified, standards-backed choice.
• Project baseline — the full inheritance contract and its conformance scorecard.
• Patterns catalog — the golden-paths index to reach into before generating anything.