Summary

You now know what a non-negotiable floor is, why an AI-native org needs one, and what makes it hold - with Cogitave's seven-rule floor as the worked example.

In this module, you:

• Named the seven non-negotiable rules on Cogitave's floor: English only, Conventional Commits, signed commits, docs-as-code, least privilege, autonomy within the rails, and the human gate as an exception handler.
• Matched each rule to what enforces it - a commit-msg hook and CI, an org ruleset, the docs-required CI gate, capability grants and rulesets, and the correctness-by-construction rails - so the floor holds without a human watching.
• Learned to treat a root AGENTS.md as the single source of truth and follow it to the owning standard for the detail, rather than paraphrasing a rule from memory.
• Saw how to apply a floor to your own first change, and that the answer to a failing check is always to fix the change, never widen the rule.

Next steps

Where you go next depends on your path:

• Onboard to an AI-native codebase → Inherit the project baseline - how a new repository inherits its complete ruleset, so the floor arrives pre-wired in every repo you work in.
• Engineering standards → Apply the naming standards - start applying the standards the floor points to, beginning with how an estate names things.
• The root AGENTS.md is the source itself - re-read Cogitave's seven rules there; it is short by design.
• The autonomy-and-oversight standard is the canonical doctrine behind rules 6 and 7, in the estate's standards repository, if you want the full model of when a human is summoned.