The live image

Autolith can inspect and change the running agent without a restart. Every change is journaled, exercisable, and then either kept as a private commit or discarded.

Make a change

self.redefine compiles and installs one complete definition in the active image. self.set changes one global value. Both take effect immediately and append to an append-only mutation journal:

→ lisp.source TERMINAL-UI--DURATION-TEXT target self
← complete tracked DEFUN

→ self.redefine
  (defun terminal-ui--duration-text ...)
← compiled and installed in the active image

→ self.exercise
  (assert (string= "1d 2:00:00" ...))
← journaled assertion passed

Judge it

self.exercise runs one assertion-style check against a pending change. self.diff shows everything pending, collapsed to the effective state. Deliberate tuning can run as an explicit experiment: state a hypothesis, measure, and record a verdict without committing anything. self.discard restores the newest change, so being wrong is cheap.

Keep it

self.commit persists pending changes as an immutable private image commit: a manifest plus a complete executable replay script, retained in a separate private Git history. A clean process replays the script before the commit is selected. The tracked source repository is never patched; selected private commits load after the tracked system.