How Primitive fits together
One operating system made from several deliberately separate authorities.
Primitive is not one giant database or one giant agent. Workspace owns product state and execution surfaces, Control owns orchestration/governance, Foundry owns governed intake from the historical estate, and Docs explains the whole thing without becoming a competing authority.
Think of Primitive like a company campus. Workspace is where people work. Control is the rules and traffic control. Foundry is the loading dock that checks incoming boxes before they enter. Docs is the map and handbook. The same campus works because each part has a clear job.
The design deliberately avoids putting capture, memory, authority, execution and documentation into one service. Information can travel between them, but it keeps provenance and passes explicit boundaries. This makes it possible to replace a model, UI or search engine without silently changing who is allowed to do what or what counts as accepted knowledge.
The four main responsibilities
The same object may be visible in several surfaces, but there should still be one canonical owner for each responsibility.
| Layer | Owns | Must not silently become |
|---|---|---|
| Workspace | Users, projects, chats, files, agents, memory, runs, approvals | A second Control authority |
| Control | Orchestration, work allocation, signals, permits, review/merge policy | The product database |
| Foundry | Estate discovery, source tags, filing, intake, Drive baseline, source search | A second Workspace |
| Docs | Explanation, navigation, source-backed read models | Implementation or governance authority |
Captured is not the same as true
Primitive preserves several states because a source can exist without being accepted knowledge. A chat, hypothesis, implementation, benchmark result and verified evidence are different things.
Authority and intelligence are separate
Models may recommend, classify, route, review or propose. Deterministic policy and human/root authority decide whether consequential effects are allowed.
Related pages
Canonical sources
These pages are explanatory read models. Where wording conflicts with implementation or a Control decision, the linked implementation/decision is authoritative and this page should be corrected.