The manifest gives banks meaning

In the legacy bank shape, weight files describe storage only; moe_manifest.json says what the banks are for. The normative graph shape instead carries its operation program in the system graph. It binds each bank to a programme — the small recipe of operations that consumes it, drawn from a named registry (gated-mlp-v1, gpt-oss-expert-v1, latent-moe-v1, …). The binary carries no programme identity of its own, and the manifest is the single authority for that fact.