Is Eight of Pentacles a yes or a no?

This card leans yes. It carries forward movement, and in a straight yes/no draw most readers take it affirmatively.

The Eight is deliberate practice: head down, repetition, incremental improvement.

It is the least glamorous card in the deck and one of the most reliably good news, because it describes the only method that actually works.

He is not looking at the ones already finished, and he has his back to the town, which is the card's quiet point about what this stage costs and what it requires.

Yes/no readings are the most popular use of tarot and the one it is worst suited to. A seventy-eight card deck built to describe nuance is being asked for one bit of information, and most of what it knows is discarded in the process.

A more useful version of the same draw: read Eight of Pentacles as what shape this takes, not whether it happens. Diligence, skill-building, apprenticeship, repetition. Do the reps.

Mastery is being accumulated here whether or not it feels like it, and it characteristically does not. The figure is deliberately not a master; Waite read the card as apprenticeship, and it describes the stage before competence rather than the arrival of it.

In an advice position it is the simplest instruction in the deck: the next repetition, today, at the standard you already know. No strategy, no readiness, no waiting for conditions.

Reversed, the lean weakens or inverts. Perfectionism, or going through the motions.

Those look opposite and produce the same result. One polishes a single piece indefinitely and never finishes; the other completes many and learns from none. Both stop the accumulation the card upright is about.

Also read for repetitive work with no learning in it, which is a real feature of some jobs and not a personal failing, and for skills allowed to lapse quietly because nothing forced their use.