The moment
A capable engineer, or a capable worker, is pointed at a repository and asked to change something small. The change takes ten minutes. Working out what is normal here — the layout, the conventions, the things that look wrong and are deliberate — takes the rest of the morning.
Why it happens
Conventions are the last thing anybody writes down, because to the people who hold them they are not knowledge, they are just how things are. What does get written is a README about the product. The gap between the two is exactly the gap a newcomer falls into.
Why a better model does not fix it
An unfamiliar repository is an information problem, not a reasoning one. A stronger worker infers conventions faster and infers the same wrong ones, because the evidence in the code is genuinely ambiguous — that is why the convention had to be a convention.
What it costs
An hour to a day per arrival, multiplied by how often arrivals happen — which, with disposable sessions, is now several times a day rather than a few times a year. And the inferences that were wrong are paid a second time, in review.
What Majordomus does
The layer is one directory with a manifest that names every section, readable by a person with no tool installed. Its protocol is stated once: read the manifest, load the sections the task needs, resolve the rules and their dependencies, never load the local half. Each directory carries a context document that adds to its ancestors, so what governs a path is composed for that path rather than searched for. Adopting an existing repository is a supported starting point: the existing instruction files are the input to the first policy rather than something to be replaced.
Before and after
before "read the README, then ask me"
after $ majordomus context resolve lib/payments
.ai/README.md the protocol of the layer
.ai/repo/README.md what is canonical here
lib/payments/README.md amounts are integers in minor units, and whyWhat it does not do
It does not write the conventions for you, and an empty layer explains nothing. It makes the place they belong obvious and the act of finding them deterministic.