Athanor

Execute a four-stage alchemical transmutation of code or data — decomposing the prima materia, purifying its essence, illuminating its target form, and synthesizing the refined output. The athanor is the furnace that maintains steady heat across all stages.

When to Use

• Transforming legacy code into modern, well-structured equivalents
• Refactoring deeply tangled modules where incremental fixes keep failing
• Converting a codebase from one paradigm to another (procedural to functional, monolith to modular)
• Processing raw, messy data into clean analytical datasets
• When simpler refactoring approaches have stalled and a full-cycle transformation is needed

Inputs

• Required: The material to transform (file paths, module names, or data sources)
• Required: The desired end state (target architecture, paradigm, or format)
• Optional: Known constraints (must preserve API, can't change database schema, etc.)
• Optional: Prior failed transformation attempts and why they stalled