What is a Workspace?

A workspace is the boundary around one architectural decision. Everything Catio needs to reason well about that decision lives inside it: the integrations you have subscribed, the Context you have written, the slice of your architecture you are looking at, and the Blueprints Catio generates from all three.

Get the boundary right and every recommendation is anchored to a real decision, owned by a real person, evaluated against one consistent set of constraints. Get it wrong, drawn too wide or too narrow, and Catio starts optimizing for a decision nobody actually owns.

One decision, one boundary

Borrow the idea of a bounded context from software architecture: a boundary within which one model, one set of rules, and one vocabulary hold consistently, and outside of which a different model may legitimately apply. A workspace is that boundary applied to decision-making instead of code.

Inside a workspace, one objective applies, one set of constraints applies, and one owner is accountable for what gets built from it. Outside it, a different workspace can have a different objective, different constraints, and a different owner. That is not fragmentation. That is the point.

The failure mode is familiar to anyone who has watched a bounded context collapse. Draw the boundary too wide, so it spans multiple owners and multiple constraint sets, and the model inside it stops being coherent. A workspace scoped to "our infrastructure" has the same problem as a domain model scoped to "the whole company." Nothing inside it is wrong exactly, but nothing inside it is decision-ready either, because it is answering several questions at once instead of one.

The shape of a workspace

A workspace is a container for four things, each scoped to it specifically:

• Access: who is in the room. A workspace is public, meaning everyone in the organization can see and access it, or private, meaning access is limited to specific people or teams. This is the first boundary you draw, and it should match who actually owns the decision the workspace exists to support.
• Subscriptions and integrations: what data comes in. Integrations are subscribed to a workspace to define its architecture scope, and subscribed integrations feed the Stacks and Blueprints modules within that workspace only. A workspace knows about the systems you have subscribed into it and nothing else.
• Context, at two scopes: what Catio optimizes for and steers by. Global Context is organization-wide information applied across every workspace. Workspace Context applies to a single workspace: the objective, in-scope systems, and constraints specific to the decision at hand. Workspace Context does not replace Global Context. It narrows and adds to it.
• Views and Blueprints: what Catio produces. Saved views in Stacks let you filter which parts of the architecture inside the boundary Catio is evaluating, for workspaces where the boundary is right but the architecture inside it is still broad. Blueprints are the architectural changes Catio generates from all of the above, scoped to the workspace that produced them.

A supporting mental model: the room and the whiteboard

Think of a workspace as a room where one conversation happens with Archie: the same people, the same facts on the table, the same whiteboard.

Global Context is everything the room already knows walking in, the standards and goals true across the organization, established once and inherited everywhere. Workspace Context is what gets written on that specific room's whiteboard: the objective, the in-scope systems, the constraints that apply to this decision and not necessarily to the one happening next door.

A workspace with no Workspace Context is an empty room with the door open. Archie can still walk in and use what the organization already knows, but nothing on the walls tells it what this particular conversation is trying to achieve.

Where this shows up

Everything downstream of a workspace inherits its boundary:

• Blueprints generated inside a workspace are evaluated against that workspace's Context, not the organization's in general. A blueprint's Context Summary lists the entries, from Global and Workspace Context both, that informed it.
• Stacks views saved inside a workspace scope which components Catio considers, without requiring you to split the workspace itself.
• Subscriptions determine which systems a workspace can see at all. A system that is not subscribed into a workspace does not exist for that workspace's Blueprints, regardless of whether it is connected elsewhere in the organization.

The architect's relationship to Workspaces

Workspaces are the unit an architect draws before doing anything else in Catio. The decision gets named, the boundary gets set, and only then do Context, Subscriptions, and Blueprint generation start producing anything worth looking at. This module is the container that makes the rest of the work legible.

In this section

• Create a Workspace: the five-step creation flow.
• Open a Workspace: switching into a workspace to start working.
• Edit a Workspace: updating a workspace's objectives, scope, or access.
• Delete a Workspace: permanently removing a workspace.