Chapter 4 · 4 of 6

It analyses — it doesn’t run the work

artwork-autopsy reads, proposes, and flags. It installs nothing, boots nothing, and runs the artwork at no point. Building the machine and actually running the work is the next tool’s job — the Research VM Controller’s, with a person watching.

There is a deliberate line down the middle of this work. artwork-autopsy characterises a piece and proposes how to revive it. It installs nothing, boots nothing, and runs the artwork at no point. Building the environment and actually running the work — the part that needs judgement and a faithful machine — belongs to the next tool along, the Research VM Controller: the workbench where a person, helped by AI, assembles a period computer in software and watches the work come up on it.

The hand-off

The three things you got back travel into a research project. The per-work knowledge base loads as context for that bench’s assistant; the runbook tells you how to assemble the machine; you build it, start the work, and watch what it reaches for — helped by AI, but with you deciding. Everything the analysis could not settle on paper — code it could not read through, a server that no longer answers, a failure it suspects — arrived as a FLAG, to be checked there, by hand.