Epistemic status markers communicate confidence

Labeling how confident or complete a note is changes how readers engage with it.

digital-gardens commonly use growth metaphors:

• Seedling 🌱 — rough idea, just planted
• Budding 🌿 — developing structure, needs work
• Evergreen 🌲 — mature, stable, reliably useful

This differs from publication's binary: draft or final.

Benefits:

• Permission to publish rough work (thinking-in-public)
• Reader calibration (expect less from seedlings)
• Visible growth trajectory
• Reduces perfectionism (writing-for-yourself-reduces-friction)

maggie-appleton popularized this specific metaphor. Others use confidence percentages, last-updated dates, or explicit epistemic statements.

The point: transparency about completeness. Notes are never done, but some are more done than others.

See: evergreen-notes