The pipeline is an elephant
An initiative — a unit of work — enters the pipeline as an ambition and exits as shipped code, reviewed and governed, or escalates to Orion when it exceeds the pipeline's boundaries. The pipeline is an elephant: too large to grasp whole, so Elrond, head of engineering, breaks it into steps, setting success criteria he refines as outcomes arrive. Merlin, the orchestrator, runs each step through a standard template: Sage analyses, Archon designs, Forge builds, Argus tests, repeating until all gates are satisfied. When deploy time comes, Radagast, the admin who runs the machines, takes over. Each finished step returns to Elrond for review against the success criteria — a gate that decides: forward, loop, or escalation. When a step fails, Albus, the architect, self-heals the breach — diagnosing and fixing it by advice or by hands-on bypass. The magic is the closed, accountable loop where each agent owns their piece, each review is a gate, and the system stays trustworthy by design.
