The six-tier sovereignty matrix

The PointSav monorepo organises every directory by purpose, not by programming language or compile format. Each directory at the repository root belongs to one of six tiers — app-, asset-, moonshot-, os-, service-, or system- — identified by a fixed prefix. A contributor reading the prefix knows immediately what layer a directory operates at without opening a file. This article covers the six tiers, the decision rule for classifying new directories, the kebab-case constraint that makes the taxonomy portable across operating systems and container registries, and the legacy names the taxonomy supersedes.

[edit]The six tiers

Every directory at the monorepo root falls into one of the following tiers:

Tier	Prefix	Purpose	Example components
1 — Application	app-	User-facing surfaces — the personality cartridges that define how a job looks and feels	app-console-input, app-mediakit-marketing, app-orchestration-command
2 — Asset	asset-	Non-code resources — fonts, icons, 3D models, design tokens, brand assets	asset-brand-pointsav, asset-brand-wcp
3 — Moonshot	moonshot-	Research and development experiments not yet promoted to production	moonshot-gpu
4 — OS	os-	Operating-system compositions — the runtime containers that load other components	[[console-os
5 — Service	service-	Background business-logic daemons	[[service-slm
6 — System	system-	Foundational technology — drivers, networking, foundation utilities	system-foundation, system-driver-network, system-audit

The word "library" is explicitly retired as a category label. It describes how code is compiled, not what it does.

[edit]The rule of purpose

A new directory is classified by its purpose, not its format. The decision is short:

Question	Tier
Does it talk to the computer — date parsing, networking, math, filesystem?	system-*
Does it talk to the user's life — contacts, email, photos, accounting?	service-*
Does it define the look and feel for a specific job?	app-*
Is it a non-code resource — a font, an icon, a design token?	asset-*
Is it speculative research not yet committed to production?	moonshot-*
Does it compose other components into a runtime container?	os-*

[edit]Why the prefix discipline scales

Three structural advantages emerge from the taxonomy:

Advantage	Effect
Discoverability	A new contributor reading a directory name knows immediately what layer it operates at without opening a file
Dependency hygiene	app-* may depend on service-* and system-*; service-* may depend on system-*; system-* has no upward dependencies — cyclic dependencies are mechanically impossible
Composition over inheritance	An operating system is an os-* composition that loads app-* cartridges and connects to service-* daemons; the OS contains no feature-specific code

This is the filesystem-level expression of composition over inheritance: the OS is a generic engine; the application is the personality.

[edit]Strict kebab-case

All six tiers use lowercase ASCII with hyphens. Capital letters are not permitted. The constraint holds across Docker registries, case-sensitive Linux filesystems, case-insensitive macOS filesystems, and DNS subdomains.

Form	Status	Reason
os-totebox	Canonical	Lowercase kebab-case
Totebox-OS	Not permitted	Mixed case creates phantom drift across operating systems
Totebox_OS	Not permitted	Underscores are not standard in repository or container names
toteboxos	Not permitted	Loses readability without a delimiter

Uppercase is preserved only for a small set of root-level operational files — README, LICENSE, CLAUDE.md, AGENT.md — where the convention predates the kebab-case rule.

[edit]Name supersession

The taxonomy took several generations to settle. Earlier names appear throughout the source archive and are normalised when content is migrated:

Earlier name	Current canonical
lib-pointsav-*	package-* (shared libraries)
software-pdfs, software-wordprocessing	app-workplace-pdfs, app-workplace-wordprocessor
console-people, node-console-people	app-console-people
sys-marketing, sys-knowledge, sys-distro	app-mediakit-marketing, app-mediakit-knowledge, app-mediakit-distribution
fleet-infrastructure-*, gateway-interface-*, route-network-admin	app-infrastructure-onprem / -leased / -cloud, app-orchestration-command, app-network-admin

[edit]See also

• os-family-overview — the eight operating systems composed using the os-* tier
• three-layer-architecture — the three-layer arrangement of vendor, customer, and operator that the monorepo sits within
• five-stage-supply-chain — how the monorepo's verified commits reach production deployments