About YaoFlow

YaoFlow is a place to think through an unresolved question using the I Ching. You write down the one thing you keep circling, cast six lines, and receive a figure — first the received text from three thousand years ago, then a modern reading that connects that figure to your situation.

It is not a fortune-telling site. We do not predict whether you'll get the promotion, get back together, or get rich. What we do is set an old symbolic system beside your question, played by its own rules, so you can look at something you already half-know from a different structure.

This is the part worth being precise about. A reading has two layers: the rule layer and the interpretation layer.

The rule layer is pure code, with no AI involved. Six three-coin tosses give six lines; the lines give the primary and transformed hexagrams; najia assigns each line its stem, branch and phase; the eight palaces fix the self and other lines; the six relations and six spirits follow classical procedure; the moment of casting fixes the year, month and day pillars, the voids, the clashes and the seasonal strength. These rules come from the classical manuals, verified item by item and pinned down by unit tests — the same six lines cast at the same moment always produce exactly the same chart.

The AI is the interpretation layer. It receives the finished, immutable chart as fact, and has exactly one job: connect that structure to your question in plain language. It cannot recompute the figure, reassign a line, or invent features the chart does not contain.

Why this matters: plenty of "AI fortune telling" simply asks a language model to imagine a hexagram and improvise, so the same question asked twice yields two contradictory answers. Here the randomness lives in the coins and nowhere else.

Hexagram 4 of the I Ching says: the first casting answers; asking again and again wears the answer out.

So if you cast on the same question twice within a day, we stop and remind you what you drew last time. You can override it — but the second cast is only fooling the person who insisted on it.

YaoFlow is built and run by one independent developer. No company, no investors. The reason it exists is plain enough: I wanted somewhere quiet to think a decision through, and the AI divination products I found either made things up or talked to their users like fools.

If you have a question, or you find an error — especially in the chart computation or the classical text, which I care about a great deal — please write to me.