crouton-architecture-contract

The crouton mental model for someone who has never seen this repo — what "layer" means (two different things), the two-halves rule, the three app.config registries, team-scoped multi-tenancy, manifest-driven field types, the numbered invariants with the incidents behind them, and the known-weak points. Use when orienting in this codebase for the first time, when a question is shaped like "how does crouton work / why is it built this way / where does X live", when deciding whether a change belongs in a package or a generated layer, when confused by an extends chain or by croutonApps/croutonCollections/croutonLayoutBlocks, or before proposing any structural change. Trigger phrases: "what is a crouton layer", "package vs generated layer", "how does multi-tenancy work here", "why is there a stub component", "where do field types come from", "what invariants must hold".