A cartridge is an AI app that has been mounted on the playground. AI Automation 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.
Ingest freight documents, classify them with Bedrock, extract the fields, match vendors and post. It is tenant-aware: it follows the tenant picked in the Console top bar and its backend re-checks it on every call (see How tenants keep customer data apart). Vendor matching and posting run through the decision core, a shared service with its own Postgres database and per-tenant row-level security.
Lives at cartridges/finance/ap-invoice/.
An accrual ledger, invoice matching, “Sound Board” variance levers and reset-to-golden — a stand-in for a customer's transport management system so AI Automation can be exercised end to end without a real one.
Lives at cartridges/finance/mock-tms/.
Point an app here instead of a mail provider and read the headers, both bodies, every attachment, and what is wrong with the message. It cannot deliver anything, by design. (Real system mail is sent separately, as no-reply@paycargo.ai.)
Lives at cartridges/global/mock-email/.
Projects, epics and intake, worked from Claude Code over MCP; feedback sent from the Console top bar lands here. Active time is inferred from events rather than a timer.
Lives at cartridges/ai-test-kitchen/backlog/.
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/.
Earlier versions of this page listed Chatbot, SquadFlow, Sales Reporting, Pipeline Analysis and Integration Workbench as live. They ran in the retired account and are not in the PayCargoDevOps/AI-Automation-Shared repo, so they are not deployed here. The rides above are the eight apps live in account 753974371195, counting the Console and obs.
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).