What a workflow is, and the measure of success he judges maturity by

The definition, stated plainly: a workflow is “how you operate”, the steps you actually take, and opening a word processor is one. What changed in 2026 is that a workflow can now change its own tooling, visualisation, comprehension and context, and the purpose of changing them is to “allow the author to stay in the zone”. Villager and explorer are phases rather than kinds of person: experience changes how deep you can reach into a workflow and how fast you read, not the steps you take. And the metric he uses for maturity, which inverts how a busy week reads: “can I do a process without making any changes to the workflow?” The memo also sets the phased experiment this document came out of, and asks for a diff between two versions of a book that is computed from the graphs rather than the markdown.