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. Every row there has 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. 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.
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.