How it is read
What a reading says, and what it refuses to say.
A reading says how something moved. It never says where it stands. Every line on The River is one part of putting agents to work, and the value beside it says whether that part got easier or harder since the last reading. Whether it's now easy enough for the work you have in mind is a different question, and the answer depends on your business. We can see the market. You can see your work.
Five values, named in full. Got much easier. Got easier. Nothing decisive found. Got harder. Got much harder. The two "much" values are used only when the move changes what a reader could decide. Where a month confirms a direction without changing any decision, the value is Got easier or Got harder. No number decides that; the test is which decision changed.
Nothing decisive found is a statement about our record, not about the world. It means we looked and found nothing that settled the direction. It does not mean nothing happened. A reader who arrives with something we missed is the best correction The River can get, and the note at the top of the page asks for exactly that.
The current runs one way. Got harder means the water brought something new: a disclosure, a ruling, a figure, a failure in public. It never means that something already settled came undone.
Why these twenty. A line earns its place when four things are true of it: it can stop agentic work reaching production, its movement can be checked in public, it is decided outside any single company, and it changes a decision someone is actually making. The third is what makes The River publishable at all. We cannot see inside your organization and do not guess at it, so anything settled within your own walls is your question rather than the market's, and it is not on this page.