marbles pl.n. [from mainstream "lost all his/her
marbles"] The minimum needed to build your way further up some
hierarchy of tools or abstractions. After a bad system crash, you
need to determine if the machine has enough marbles to come up on
its own, or enough marbles to allow a rebuild from backups, or if
you need to rebuild from scratch. "This compiler doesn't even
have enough marbles to compile {hello, world}."