Final assembly

Once the chapters that passed verification are in, the last step is assembly. book-studio’s pipeline only produces per-chapter outputs. Combining the chapters into a single manuscript file is not an automated step; it’s something the user does. That’s why there’s no publish or distribution section.

As far as the pipeline goes

Chapters that cleared Tier 4 Quality stay as per-chapter files in chapters/.

_workspace/{book_slug}/
├── 04_chapter_outline.json     source of truth for chapter order
└── chapters/
    ├── ch01_draft.md           body
    ├── ch01_review.md          aggregated editing + continuity review
    ├── ch01_ai_check.md        AI-smell gate report
    └── ...

Once quality-agent finishes the per-chapter review, it flips that chapter’s status in 04_chapter_outline.json to review_pass. When every chapter is review_pass, the book is ready to assemble. The pipeline does not produce a separate assembled file on its own.

The user gathers the manuscript

Assembly means gathering the ch{NN}_draft.md files that passed into a single file, in the order of 04_chapter_outline.json. If a chapter file’s number and the outline’s order differ, follow the outline. You can tell the AI “gather the chapters that passed into one file in outline order,” and you can give the result a name like final/manuscript.md. Assembly only stitches chapters together rather than writing new ones, so nothing changes content at this step.

Why it doesn’t auto-publish

Even after a manuscript is assembled, it doesn’t go up to an external platform automatically (S8). Submission sites, ebook platforms, and print intake are decided and run by the user.

This is because of the nature of the book domain. A blog post is easy to fix after publishing, but a book is expensive to undo once submitted or published. Publishing decisions involve human judgment — contracts, copyright, editor discussions — so the principle blocks the AI from putting a finished version out on its own. The manual too covers only up to assembly, and beyond that is the user’s domain.

Version backups

Back up to .bak or .v1 before overwriting the manuscript (S3). The prior version doesn’t disappear when you fix a chapter and reassemble. Together with per-chapter commit (S5), the manuscript can be rolled back at both the chapter level and the assembled level.

Post-assembly check

When you gather the manuscript, look at the chapter order, missing chapters, and unresolved items from the continuity review once. If there are unresolved items left in a chapter’s ch{NN}_review.md, it’s better to go back to Tier 3 and clean them up before assembling. Assembly gathers chapters that cleared verification; it isn’t a substitute for verification.

Next

The next section is updates. It covers the spot where the base’s new skills or updated gates are brought safely into a fork.