---
name: emperor-excavate
description: >-
  Digital coding archaeology. Use when the codebase is lost, ancient, mixed,
  undocumented, Pascal, assembly, COBOL, a ROM, or any stack that is not the
  agent's fashion. Survey artifacts, hunt manuals, recover one runnable
  behavior. Language-agnostic.
metadata:
  version: 0.4.12
  part-of: emperor-time
---

# Excavate

Open `references/archaeology.md`. Then `references/language-agnostic.md`.
Dowsing surveys. Jail hunts one manual heading. Judgment refuses "I modernized
it" as DONE.

Probe = whatever command the recovered unit answers to. Not pytest-by-default.

`scripts/emperor excavate` works as an alias for the identify survey.