Gestalt Documentation

Status: Fixture Preview. Gestalt’s membrane is contract-stable, but production admission is intentionally gated. Every operation today returns production_admission: false. These docs describe what the shape is, what works as a fixture rehearsal today, and what is not yet authentic. See reference/capability-state.md and workflows/open/022-end-user-api-completeness-gap-report.md for what is and is not real.

Gestalt is the authority runtime for serious business action. It is the place where mutable business intent becomes admissible company reality. These docs are for the people who interact with Gestalt from the outside: developers building on the SDK, agencies and IT consultants building Koerper surfaces, operators running the workbench, advisors connecting through scoped lenses, and Verlag publishers shipping authority instruments.

If you are looking for the project’s deeper philosophical foundation, read the meditations and the project README first.

Start here

If you have never seen Gestalt before:

1. What is Gestalt? — the one-page positioning.
2. Glossary — the vocabulary you need to read everything else.
3. Getting started — run the fixture cloud and hit your first endpoint.

If you are a developer integrating the SDK:

1. Glossary and Concepts: the membrane.
2. SDK: TypeScript or SDK: Rust.
3. SDK: fixture mode for local development.
4. API reference for the operations you call.

If you are an agency or IT consultant building a Koerper:

1. Concepts: Geist and Koerper.
2. Guide: building a Koerper.
3. Guide: German invoice / payment / advisor — the worked end-to-end fixture walk.

If you are an operator running Gestalt:

1. Operations: local fixture.
2. Operations: Hetzner + Cloudflare.
3. Operations: observability.
4. CLI reference.

If you are an advisor (Steuerberater, Kanzlei, auditor):

1. Concepts: advisor lenses.
2. Guide: advisor integration — the lens.scope/lens.disclose, advisor.openMatter/issueOpinion/ requestEvidence, and intervention.request/issue surfaces are on the membrane today as staging-durable fixture operations.

If you are a Verlag publisher:

1. Concepts: pendulums and Verlag.
2. Concepts: authority packages.
3. Guide: publishing an authority package.

If you are an agent / MCP host:

1. Concepts: the membrane.
2. MCP server.
3. Reference: capability state — know what your tools can and cannot bind.

What is in this tree

• what-is-gestalt.md — positioning, what Gestalt is and is not.
• glossary.md — every term in one place.
• getting-started.md — install, run, first call.
• concepts/ — the model you need to think correctly: membrane, Geist and Koerper, atoms and capabilities, authority packages, realities and projection, effects, receipts and proofs, pendulums and Verlag, advisor lenses, refusal codes.
• sdk/ — TypeScript SDK, Rust SDK, fixture mode.
• api/ — every membrane operation grouped by family.
• cli/ — workbench commands.
• mcp/ — Gestalt as MCP tools.
• guides/ — worked walkthroughs.
• operations/ — running Gestalt locally and in staging, plus customer support and incident communication.
• reference/ — refusal codes, outcomes, capability state, fixture vs production.
• legal/ — customer-facing data processing, privacy, retention, pilot terms, and public claims review.

Capability state labels

Every doc page that describes a membrane operation carries one of these labels. They tell you what kind of consequence a call has today.

Label	Meaning
shape-only	The contract and types are defined; the call returns a structurally-correct response but no consequence is recorded.
fixture-rehearsed	The call walks an end-to-end fixture flow; receipts and refusals are shape-correct; no real company reality is bound.
staging-durable	State persists across restarts on the staging cloud, but production admission is still gated.
authentic	Production-admitted. Real consequence. Real proof. (Nothing carries this label today.)

If a page does not carry a label, treat it as shape-only.

How to read these docs honestly

Gestalt is unusual. It is not a SaaS product. It is not a database. It is not a workflow engine. It is not a legal-tech app. The vocabulary is heavy on purpose because the substrate is heavy on purpose. You will get more out of these docs if you read what-is-gestalt.md and the glossary before any reference page.

You will also get more out of them if you accept that today Gestalt is a stable contract you can build against, not a runtime you can host serious customers on. The docs make this distinction on every page that needs it.

Versioning and stability

• The membrane contract is at version 0.0.1-fixture.
• The doc set tracks the contract. Each doc page lists which contract version it was last verified against.
• Breaking changes to the contract will bump its version and these docs will follow.
• The vocabulary in glossary.md is stable and will not silently change meaning.

Project foundation (recommended further reading)

• Project README — Gestalt’s constitutional line.
• Meditations — eleven foundational essays. Optional but rewarding.
• Workflows — open and closed planning briefs.

Contributing back

These docs are not for Gestalt contributors; they are for end users. If you find an inaccuracy, an obsolete file path, an outdated capability-state label, or a missing operation, open an issue or send a PR. Doc PRs that change capability-state labels should reference the commit or contract version that justifies the change.