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One line, three product families, seven stations. Every unit the factory builds — skill, tool, or agent — moves through the same sequence, with a gate between each pair of stations that the unit must pass before moving on. 
WORK ORDER → DESIGN → ASSEMBLE → VERIFY → CERTIFY → DEPLOY → OPERATE
(intake)    (spec +   (compose   (the     (lot      (autonomy  (no exit:
             eval      from       paint    number)   dial)      telemetry,
             first)    parts)     shop)                          re-cert,
                                                                 recall)

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The walking tour

  • Station 0 — Work Order. The front door. Pull only: no unit enters the line without a named principal who wants it and will use it. Intent in, method out.
  • Station 1 — Design. Identity and spec are written here — and so is the eval, before the unit exists. The gauge is built before the part.
  • Station 2 — Assemble. The cheap station, kept cheap. Composition from standard parts, one unit at a time, zero manual fitting.
  • Station 3 — Verify. The expensive building. Three fail-closed layers turn a built unit into an evidenced one. Per Thesis 1, the deepest capital investment in the plant.
  • Station 4 — Certify. The lot number. Evidence becomes a signed, versioned, expiring certificate; the operator accepts the claim.
  • Station 5 — Deploy. The autonomy dial. Mechanical export of the certified unit, staged rollout, kill switch retained forever.
  • Station 6 — Operate. Permanent. No exit gate, because no exit: telemetry, re-certification, recall, and the silence andon live here as long as the unit does.

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Two shapes worth noticing

The line narrows toward the middle. Assembly is nearly free and parallel; verification is scarce and paced. A factory that assembles 100 units a day and verifies 2 is a 2-a-day factory with a WIP problem, so flow control lives at the narrow point. The line never ends. Deployment is transfer from a high-frequency inspection zone to a low-frequency one, not an exit (Thesis 2). The last station is a permanent residence. The line’s canonical definition is the factory’s standard work — a germline document with an enforced changelog. This page is the tour; that document is the law.

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Self-audit

ClaimSource
One line, three families, seven stations; station diagramdocs/factory-design.md:85–93
Pull only; named principal at intakedocs/factory-design.md:97
Eval written before the unit at Designdocs/factory-design.md:107
Verify is the deepest capital investment; 100-assembled/2-verifieddocs/factory-design.md:26, 121
Operate is permanent; deployment is zone transfer, not exitdocs/factory-design.md:154, workflows/production-line.md:78
Standard work is germline with enforced changelogworkflows/production-line.md:95–99