The loop
The home page uses plain words: who is doing it, what finished looks like, by when, a real yes, a hedge. This page uses the terms underneath them, the ones Fernando Flores and Terry Winograd used when they brought speech act theory into the design of work. Nothing changes except the names.
Two roles
Every loop has a customer, the person who wants something, and a performer, the person who will do it. The words have nothing to do with money; the owner of a company is the customer when she asks the office manager to get a job moving, and the apprentice is a customer when he asks the foreman which permit to pull. One person is both, many times a day, and a great deal of confusion at work comes from not knowing which role you are in at a given moment.
Preparation, ending in a request
The customer works out what they need and whom to ask. Done well, this is where the conditions of satisfaction take shape: a description of the result good enough that a stranger could tell whether it had been met, the person who is to produce it, and the time by which it is needed. Done badly, the request names none of those, and the performer is left to guess, which is why "can you get the Feeney job moving?" feels like a request and holds like smoke.
A request can also arrive as an offer, where the performer proposes the work before anyone asks for it. The loop is the same from there.
Negotiation, ending in an agreement
The performer has more choices than yes. They can accept, which turns the request into a promise. They can decline, which closes the loop cleanly; a clear no is a complete and respectable move, not a failure. They can counter-offer, proposing a different scope or a different date. They can ask for clarification, which is often the most useful thing anyone does in the whole loop: "which permit, and is the plan set stamped yet?" turns a vague ask into something a person could promise. Or they can commit to commit: "let me check and get back to you by Wednesday," which is itself a small promise with its own date.
And then there is the hedge. "I'll try." "Should be able to." "When I get a chance." A hedge is not a lie and it is not a fault; it is a way of operating. It keeps the performer's options open when they do not know their own load, and between people who trust each other it often works fine. Its cost is that it creates no obligation, the customer usually knows that, and both of them have to carry the uncertainty until the date passes. A hedge is the loose knot in the thread. The question worth asking about one is not "was that wrong?" but "did both of us know it was a hedge, and was that what we wanted?"
Performance, ending in a declaration of completion
The work gets done. In conversation this phase is mostly silent, broken by progress reports and, when something changes, by renegotiation: "this is going to take until Friday; does that still work?" Renegotiating early is how a person honors their word when they cannot keep it as given, and a loop that was renegotiated is a very different thing from a loop that was quietly let lapse, even when the work lands on the same day.
This is also the phase where the performer becomes a customer in turn, opening smaller loops with other people to get what this one needs. A big loop is usually a bundle of small ones, and when the big one is late the cause is nearly always a small one nobody could see.
The phase ends when the performer declares the work complete. Not when it is complete; when they say so. Work that is finished but never declared is, as far as the customer can tell, still in progress.
Assessment, ending in satisfaction
The customer declares satisfaction, or declares that the result does not meet the conditions, which reopens the loop. This is the move most often skipped. Many loops end in silence, with the performer unsure whether the thing they delivered was what was wanted and the customer having moved on. A plain "yes, that's what I needed" costs a few seconds and closes the account; its absence is a small debt that accumulates across hundreds of loops into a workplace where nobody is sure what is finished.
What the Diagnostic looks for
When you paste a thread, the Diagnostic reads each message for these moves: a request or offer, an acceptance or decline or counter, a clarifying question, a progress report, a declaration of completion, an assessment. For each request it looks for the three conditions of satisfaction and says which are there and which are missing. For each yes it looks for a hedge. Then it ties the moves into loops and shows you where each one stands. It does not score anyone and it does not keep the thread.
Where the terms come from
J. L. Austin noticed that some sentences do things rather than describe things; John Searle sorted those doings into kinds. Flores and Winograd took Searle's kinds and arranged the ones that matter for getting work done into this loop, which they called a conversation for action, and built the first software around it in the 1980s. That software asked people to label their own speech and was resented for it. A language model can do the labeling in the background while people talk the way they already talk, which is the whole reason this site exists now and did not forty years ago. The reading list has the sources; the glossary has the terms side by side with the plain words.