Your work lanes, and the three endings
Four lanes, one question each
On a project you get four columns, and between them they answer what the engine has done, what it is doing, and what it is waiting to find out. Needs you — work that cannot be done without you, because it means a change on your own website. In flight — queued, or being built right now. Measuring — published, waiting to learn whether it changed anything. Done — finished, with somewhere to go and check. Every lane shows a COUNT, never a rate. Two hundred items that have been measuring for four days is not a 0% citation rate, and showing it as one would be a lie told with true arithmetic.
Measuring is a state, not a failure
An item sitting in Measuring reads at a glance like work that did not land. It is not. It has not been judged yet. Citation is measured on later visibility runs and takes weeks rather than days. So the lane tells you how long an item has been out and when it is next checked, and it never predicts the answer. An item that is never cited is a real and honest outcome — but it is one you will learn later, not one this lane is implying now.
An empty lane says which kind of empty
Nothing queued, the engine paused, and nothing being measured at all are three completely different facts that look identical as a blank panel — and the third one means the loop can never close, which is the most important thing on the screen when it is true. The Measuring lane also names what is going to check it, and when. An item can sit there indefinitely if nothing is watching that subject: a project with no watchlist can publish evidence forever and never learn anything from it. Better to say so than to leave a quiet column looking healthy.
The three endings on Needs you
Needs you is the only lane a PERSON finishes, so it is the only one with buttons. A row there has up to three ways to end and they are not interchangeable. Build this for me — hands the row back to the engine. Use it whenever the work turns out to be something we can generate after all. It is listed first deliberately: it is the ending that gets the work done rather than the one that clears the row. It appears only where the engine really can make the thing: a Reddit thread is a reply in somebody else's community, which we never post for you, so those rows offer the other two. I've done this — takes the address of the page you made. We record your page as what closed the gap, so it is your URL that gets watched from then on. A gap closed without an address is a gap we cannot measure. Not doing this — stops the row being raised again. This one is permanent, and it is the only permanent button on the screen. Use it for work that genuinely does not apply to your business, rather than for work you are putting off. There is no cost to leaving a row sitting there. A row the engine gave up on — "gave up after 3 attempts" — also offers Try this again, which clears the count and puts it back in the queue. It keeps the other two endings: if you would rather write the page yourself, or not have it at all, say so there instead of paying for another attempt. Arriving from the dashboard note opens every row in the lane, not only the first five.
A page we wrote that had nowhere to go
Sometimes the engine writes a page and cannot place it: the site's login was refused, or no site is connected yet. The page is kept, whole, on the row. While there is nowhere to send it, the row sits in Needs you and says so — the fix is a connection under Publishing, not a page for you to write. The moment a destination resolves, an hourly check sends the page we already wrote, with no second draft, and the row moves to In flight. Until 6 September 2026 that check did not exist: rows promised "the next cycle" and stayed exactly where they were.
A page waiting where we sent it
Some pages are written, sent, and then held where they went. The row sits in Needs you and says which of three places it is, because each one asks something different of you. Sent to your site's review queue — your site holds new posts until somebody approves them. Approve it on your site. We keep checking for it, or press It's live: give its address to close the row straight away. Accepted by your site without an address — your site took the post but did not say where it lives, so it is probably live already. Press It's live: give its address and paste where it is; until then we keep looking. Held in your Google Drive — a Google Doc, Sheet or deck you asked to review before it goes out. It is published or discarded under Evidence Engine → Waiting for your review, not in Drive, and the row links there. Build this for me is not offered on these rows, because the page already exists. On the first two, Not doing this stops the row being raised again and leaves the post where it is on your site.
Why this lane used to only grow
Until 4 September 2026 there were no endings at all. The lane simply accumulated: twenty-one items on one project, none of them clearable, several already done on the customer's own site with no way to say so — and some of them work the engine could have built, if anyone had been able to hand it back. If a row looks like something we should be building rather than something you should be writing, press Build this for me. It tests what the row is actually ASKING FOR rather than how it was originally labelled, so a fair number of them will simply go.