I ran the hello world flow, but I’m confused about how @step transitions work internally. Can someone clarify.

From what I’ve seen while going through the code, each

@step

in Metaflow is a node in a DAG. When you call

self.next(...)

, it doesn’t invoke the next step directly but it records the transition in metadata and the runtime schedules the next step as a separate task. So execution looks more like: step finishes → metadata updated → scheduler triggers next step Each step runs in isolation, persists its artifacts (like

self.x

) and metadata, and the next step loads that state before running. That’s why transitions aren’t function calls but orchestrated task executions. I’ve been digging into the metadata service recently, and you can actually see these transitions reflected as API calls/state updates between steps.

It's actually visible in the cli no?