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, users and groups, and per-cartridge spending. Also holds the documentation tab (this one).
Lives at cartridges/administrative/obs/. Operator-facing only.
Talk to Claude inside the playground. Every conversation goes through a guardrail; every call is cost-attributed to the user who made it; the response streams as it's generated.
Lives at cartridges/global/chatbot/. Available to every authenticated PayCargo user.
A multi-screen ride: a sprint board, AI issue assessments (is this issue ready to build? what's missing?), and repo research. It reads GitHub + ZenHub through each user's own connection, and every assessment is steered by the operator's grounding docs. This is what "Code-agents / golden-spec" grew into.
Lives at cartridges/engineering/squad-assess/. Engineering audience.
Upload a transactions spreadsheet (xlsx/csv); the ride parses it and generates templated payables reports. A report generator, not a chat — the numbers come from the file you bring.
Lives at cartridges/sales/sales-reporting/.
Valuation workbooks reconciled and cross-referenced, then rendered as the executive waterfall — the numbers the sales leadership reads.
Lives at cartridges/sales/pipeline-dashboard/.
Run read-only test calls against connected providers (Salesforce, GitHub, ZenHub, Power BI, GitBook) to confirm a connection works before a cartridge relies on it. Writes are blocked by design.
Lives at cartridges/labs/integration-workbench/.
Projects of versioned files; every file versions immutably; documents render as live artifacts behind a security boundary, are shared to named people, and carry comments pinned to the exact version you read. It's also where automated writers publish. See Step 6.u.
Lives at cartridges/global/doc-vault/.
Read-only AI audits (discipline drift, SOC 2, cartridge quality) run on EventBridge schedules and publish reports into Doc Vault. Its console lets an operator run one now, watch run history, edit the doctrine the auditor follows, and connect an external scheduled evaluator. See Step 6.w.
Lives at cartridges/administrative/foundation-audit/.
These department folders exist with placeholder markers (cartridges/marketing/, cartridges/hr/, cartridges/finance/). As a department identifies its first AI use case, its first cartridge lands there. (Labs is no longer empty — it holds Integration Workbench.)
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).