workflowForge
A rendering engine for workflow diagrams. You write the workflow with your own model — this page draws it, mechanically, without ever reading what is in it.
Step 2 happens in your model, not here — your process text goes to whichever provider you use, on their terms. This page itself sends nothing: it is one file, it makes no network requests after it loads, and there is no account, no server and nothing to install.
It is inside this file, along with the renderer. Nothing is fetched to give it to you.
With a description of your process. Claude, ChatGPT, whichever you already use — you run this step, not this page. It hands back a workflow file.
The renderer turns it into one self-contained HTML page you can send to anyone. Or download the renderer and run it yourself.
It is inside this file
The prompt and the renderer both travel inside this page. Copying the prompt fetches nothing and tells no one you did it.
You run this step, not this page
This is the only step where your process text leaves your machine, and it goes to the model vendor you already chose — on their terms, not ours. This page is not involved and never sees it.
Both produce the same file
This page will render your workflow without ever reading it — but you do not have to take that on trust. The renderer is open source, so the whole thing runs on your machine with nothing pasted anywhere.
One repository, no dependencies
Nothing here is a service, so there is nothing to be locked into. The renderer that draws this page is the same code you can run locally, and the format is a plain JSON file. If you would rather your workflow never touched someone else's page at all, this is the supported path, not a workaround.
Same renderer, same bytes out
The build is deterministic: the same document produces the same page every time, here or on your machine. That is what makes the two paths genuinely interchangeable rather than a hosted version and a lesser one.
./build.shThe renderer draws it without reading it
The renderer is mechanical: it validates the shape of the document and lays out what it finds. It makes no judgement about your process and sends nothing anywhere.
Shape only — never content
The only gate. It checks that the document is the right shape, not that your process is any good — that judgement stays with you and the people who run it.
Verbatim, paths included
The validator's message is written to be pasted straight back. It names the path that failed and the rule it broke, which is usually all the model needs to return a corrected document.
No server, no build, no dependencies
What comes out is a single file that carries its own renderer, styles and content. It opens from a mail attachment on a laptop with no network.
Confidence
Every step carries a verification state, and an absent one means unverified — authority is earned by a human act, never granted by omission. Unchecked boxes draw a 1.04px border and checked ones 1.92px, so the answer is on the canvas rather than buried in a panel. All 256 steps below are light. Review mode walks a sheet, marks each step, and exports the marked copy.
Freshness
A document says when it was written and how often it wants revisiting — naturalization asks for six months, checkout-ux for a year — and the line under each header does that arithmetic against your clock, never the build's. Nothing moves the date on its own, because a rebuild is not a review. Starter carries no date and so gets no line at all: a document that makes no claim about its age is not nagged about one.
Depth
A diagram that fits on a page can only ever be an index. Click any box and the panel behind it holds the actual work — the runbook, the schema, the wireframe with every control wired to where it leads. 197 of the 256 steps enumerate their own failure modes, and all 256 open. Left and right walk the panels without going back to the sheet, and nothing is fetched to fill them — the material travels inside this file.
Specification
On an agent sheet a step is not a description of what should happen. 66 steps name their model, the tools that turn may call and a worked transcript of it going right; 43 of those add the guardrails. The diagram is the control flow around them, exceptions included: 35 of the 66 sit off the happy path, so a guardrail that trips is a step with its own transcript rather than a footnote.
Exceptions
The successful path runs straight down the left edge, and every branch that can go wrong hangs off it to the right — the further right a box sits, the worse the situation that put you there. A branch is control flow and gets a box of its own; the smaller ways a single step can fail are listed inside that step, under "When it goes wrong". 113 of these 256 boxes are things going wrong, and 197 steps enumerate their own failure modes on top of that.
Legibility
The renderer tests every horizontal against every vertical, lays the sheet out again if it finds an intersection, and refuses to build the file if it cannot separate them. A guarantee rather than a habit, asserted by a test across all 15 sheets — which is why these stay readable at two hundred steps where a hand-drawn chart stops at twenty.
Ownership
Swimlanes want an axis and both are spent: down is sequence, right is severity. So each box carries a three-character chip of its owner's initials, the legend dims the sheet to one actor while you hover it, and where the owner changes the connecting line is ticked with the receiving initials. Handoffs are where processes fail.
Severity
Tone was hue alone, which a colour-blind reader or a black-and-white print loses entirely. Branch labels lead with a glyph — ▲ warning, ✗ error, ⓘ note, ✓ success — picked by drawing twenty-four candidates at the size they actually render, then again through a 1-bit threshold. None is in the emoji set: a colour-emoji font would repaint it a colour the tone never chose.
Five worked examples below, each a page of its own — 256 steps across 15 sheets. The path that works runs straight down one column; everything that can go wrong hangs off it to the right in a box of its own, so a failure mode nobody enumerated is a missing box rather than a sentence nobody wrote — 113 of the 256 steps are things going wrong.
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A fix for a bug you have not seen is a guess. Reproducing first is what separates a hotfix from a second incident.
A small worked example you can edit
A deliberately small document, here so you can press Build and watch the loop close before you write your own. Edit any title, press Build again, and the page…
It teaches a model the format and nothing else. Paste it into Claude, ChatGPT or anything comparable, then describe your process — or attach a flowchart you already have.
A single JSON document — a WFD file, which is just this format’s name for it. Fenced code blocks are fine; the fence is stripped for you. Or load the document this page was built from and edit that — nothing here goes back to the model for a change you can make yourself.
One HTML page, no server, no build. It carries this builder and this prompt, so whoever you send it to can do the same. There is no send button anywhere here on purpose: the file lands in your downloads and you mail, commit or host it yourself.