Coldstart is in final cutover and has not been released. This section describes how the development build behaves; there is no release you can install today, so read it as a description of the method rather than instructions you can follow tonight.
The previous section was about what a session can find when it looks. This one is about what reaches it without looking, and what it has to ask for.
The question underneath is a budget question. Every instruction that is always available is paid for in every session, including the sessions it has nothing to do with. Every instruction that is only available on request is free until the moment it is needed, and useless if nothing knows to request it. A method that ignores either half fails in a predictable direction: load everything and the working window fills with material about a job nobody is doing, or load nothing and the specialised guidance sits on disk being correct where no one reads it.
[Visual 4 — A horizontal band across the top of the frame, drawn thin and solid, labelled "the resident floor — paid in every session, before any work happens". Inside the band sits a row of small identical tags, each showing a name and a single line of text; a bracket beneath the row reads "descriptions only, never bodies". Below the band, a large open area labelled "the library — on disk, costing nothing until it is asked for" holds two shapes side by side: a tall stack of small cards labelled "atomic files, one concept each", and a flat shelf of wider cards labelled "capability cards, each declaring its trigger phrases and three closed facet values". A small box at the bottom left labelled "one query" sends two arrows. The first runs up into the shelf and back out carrying exactly one card up through the band, labelled "one match, loaded now". The second ends at a small empty square labelled "NO-MATCH — a receipt, not a guess", with no card attached to it. A caption under the whole frame reads "the floor is what you always pay; everything else is a decision made at the moment of need". Each page in this section enlarges one part of this frame.]
The three pages
| # | Concept | What it covers |
|---|---|---|
| 4.1 | The resident floor | What is always loaded, why it is descriptions rather than instructions, and the one thing that is actually capped |
| 4.2 | Routed capability | How a request finds a method, and what the product returns when the library has nothing |
| 4.3 | Depth on demand | Why guidance is split into single-concept files, and how their cost is declared rather than assumed |
The one division this section is built on
Two things are being separated, and they behave differently.
A description says what something is for. It is short, it is always present, and its only job is to let a decision be made about whether to read further. It is a map entry.
A body says how to do the thing. It can be long, it is loaded only after a description has been matched, and it is the actual content.
Almost everything in this section follows from keeping those two apart. The floor holds descriptions. The library holds bodies. Growth in the library is close to free; growth in the floor is paid for by every session forever, which is why the two are governed by different rules.
Why the honest miss matters more than the match
A routing mechanism that always returns something is not a routing mechanism. It is a ranking of whatever happens to be on the shelf, and the top of that ranking is indistinguishable from a real answer.
So the shape that matters is the empty result. When nothing in the library covers the request, the product says so in the result itself, names what it looked for, and instructs the reader to proceed on general skill rather than invent a method that does not exist. That is a smaller promise than "the library has what you need", and it is the promise that can actually be kept.
What this section does not cover
It covers how guidance is found, not whether the guidance is any good. Nothing here checks that a method works, that a description describes its body honestly, or that a match was the best available. Reachability and quality are different claims, and only the first one is mechanised.
It also does not cover rules that must hold whether or not anything is loaded. Guidance is something the session consults; a rule that matters cannot depend on being consulted. That is section 5.
Next
Start with the part that is always there: the resident floor.
How current this page is
Checked on 10 August 2026 against the product's current resident surface, its library query and its recorded release state. It describes a loading discipline, not evidence that routed guidance produces better work. To ask whether a claim here still holds, or to report one that does not, write to [email protected].