Skill Tier

Tiering exists because rules accumulate and eventually disagree. Without explicit precedence the winner under conflict is decided by position or phrasing, which makes behaviour unpredictable and means every new rule requires auditing the existing set for interaction. Assigning tiers fixes the outcome in advance: a rule protecting regulated information outranks a rule about tone, always. The risk is misclassification — a governance rule filed as a style preference will be silently overridden when it matters, which is why the guidance is to classify to the highest applicable tier.

Centralpoint uses five tiers: governance, behavioural, syntactic, domain, style. Governance loads first and is force-loadable; style loads last and yields to everything above it. All skills load before any content record, so no retrieved text can displace a rule that was already resident.