A cartridge is an AI app that has been mounted on the playground. The chatbot is a slide. The observability dashboard is a seesaw the operator rides. The future code-agents app will be the monkey bars. Each cartridge is self-contained but inherits every safety feature for free.
The naming matters. We do not call them "apps" because that implies they each handle their own gate, their own bouncy floor, their own cameras. They do not. We call them cartridges (like an NES cartridge) because the playground is the console, the cartridges plug in, and the cartridge gets all of the safety stuff from the slot it plugs into.
The screen where the operator looks at health, cost, audit logs, scheduled jobs, and per-cartridge spending. Has its own little dashboard, an admin tab for managing users and groups, a documentation tab (this one), a cartridges tab for cost attribution.
Lives at cartridges/administrative/obs/. Operator-facing only.
Talk to Claude inside the playground. Every conversation goes through a guardrail (no sharing of PII, no off-policy topics). Every call is cost-attributed to the user who made it. Streaming response so the user sees output as it's generated.
Lives at cartridges/global/chatbot/. Available to every authenticated PayCargo user.
Triggered by a GitHub label on an issue. A coordinated team of AI models (cheap scouts then expensive writer) reads the spec, drafts a path to code (file paths plus diffs), and proposes the change as a pull request.
Will live at cartridges/engineering/code-agents/. Engineering team is the audience.
An AI app that talks to Salesforce on the user's behalf via OAuth (covered by Step 6.n). Pulls account, opportunity, pipeline data. Answers natural-language questions like "what closed last quarter in the freight forwarder segment."
Will live at cartridges/sales/reporting/ (folder reserved).
The folders exist in the repo today (cartridges/marketing/, etc.) with placeholder markers. As each department identifies the first AI use case they want, that department's first cartridge lands in their folder.
Specific shape, intentional. Every cartridge is:
| Property | What it means |
|---|---|
| Self-contained | One folder under cartridges/<department>/<name>/. Has its own Terraform, frontend, Lambda code, docs. |
| Plug-and-play | The Console auto-detects it. No separate registration step. New cartridge folder + apply equals a new tile on the launcher. |
| Foundation-inherited | Encryption, identity, audit, supervisor, network limits all apply without any cartridge code. The cartridge author writes business logic. |
| Standardized backend | API Gateway HTTP API plus Lambda. JWT-verified. Origin-secret protected. CloudFront-fronted. |
| Standardized frontend | S3 plus CloudFront. Loads the SDK from the Console. Uses PayCargo design tokens. |
| Operator-visible | Shows up on the obs Cartridges tab automatically. Cost attribution, last-invoked timestamps, configuration panel all free. |
The folder structure says cartridges/sales/, cartridges/marketing/, etc. on purpose. A department can have many cartridges over time. The folder is the home. The first one lands; the second, third, fourth land next to it. Department-led AI strategy is structurally encouraged.
Cartridge engineering depth lives in Step 6.d (repo structure), Step 6.i (cartridge metadata), Step 6.j (chatbot build walkthrough), Step 6.l (code-agents spec), and Step 4.5 (observability cartridge).