After a call with @Danney Tee who kindly demo'd his full system at Reelix and gave me inspiration for what he had done. I decided to have a bit of fun and create my own mechanism, scoping in on one of the areas, which is AI being able to watch and analyze videos.... So I built codename "Argus" -- Still in development but showing some insanely promising results! Argus is the layer that watches a published video and writes down what was on screen, second by second. It is also the cleanest ICM structure I have built, for a boring reason: a pipeline already has stages, so you let the folders be them. - The stages - 01 to 08 in flow order. Each is a folder holding its own script, its own CONTEXT.md of local rules, and its own output. - The root context - only the rules that genuinely cross every stage. What a frame is, how a missing value is recorded, what the system never claims. - _config - the channel. Vocabularies, the editorial ladder, the thresholds. The stages hold the engine, the config holds the channel. The flow reads straight off the folder names. Stages 01 to 05 describe: fetch the video, cut it into frames, measure the frames, ask a model what is happening in each second, roll it up into buckets. Stage 06 synchronises, mapping the editorial plan for that video onto what was described. Stages 07 and 08 derive, joining to the retention curve and rendering the written product, and they are not allowed to add any new observation - only to compute from what came before. The ICM part is that a job sent to stage 03 opens stage 03. It reads that folder's rules and its inputs, and inherits nothing else except the handful of root rules that actually apply everywhere. No stage carries the whole pipeline in its head. That is the difference between a pipeline in folders and one long instruction file trying to describe eight things at once, and it is why I can hand a stage to a job without re-explaining the system around it.