You can see it working

A thirty-seven sheet permit set takes minutes to read. The card told you what it was doing — Biddy is finding the rooms · Sheet 1 of 2 — and then sat perfectly still while it did it. Correct, and indistinguishable from broken. Nobody should have to guess whether the thing is thinking or dead.

Every step that's working now moves. A pulsing dot in front of the line, and nothing pulsing on a step that's finished or one that needs a hand.

Each one keeps its own clock. 1:42, counting up from when that step started, ticking every second. The wait for the plans to finish has its own clock; when matching actually starts, the line changes to Biddy is matching rooms to the schedule and the clock starts again from zero, so you can see it move on rather than guessing.

And it says when it last heard from the read. Sheet 12 of 37 · updated 4s ago. That part is real — it's the last thing the read itself reported, not a timer pretending. Sheets, rooms found so far, schedule rows, walls, rooms measured: whatever the stage is counting is what the line shows.

Quiet gets said out loud, calmly. If nothing's come back for a minute and a half, the line stops counting seconds at you and says Still working — this one's a big sheet. At five minutes: Taking longer than usual — still running. You can leave this page and come back. You can. Closing the tab doesn't stop the read, and the rooms are there when you come back.

The measuring pass isn't silent any more. Where the tile schedule didn't put a number on a surface, Biddy goes back to the drawings and reads the size off the sheet, one room at a time. On a whole house that's the slowest part of the job, and until now the card said nothing at all about it — your plans went green and several minutes passed with no explanation. Step 3 now reads Biddy is measuring the rooms · Room 5 of 13 while it happens. The rooms are already on the page, so you can start going through them; what's still arriving is sizes, and those land as suggestions for you to check.

Two smaller things that came with it. A card you'd condensed to its one-line summary opens itself back up while something is genuinely being read, so live work is never hidden behind a chevron. And if you've asked your phone or computer for reduced motion, nothing pulses — the clock and the counts still tick, which is the part that proves it's alive anyway.