Day 49 of 49 · Saturday · Learning

Phase 3 — what a dashboard does that STATUS.md can'tReview

Phases 0, 1, and 2 all landed Saturday. Mission Control is what's left — and since STATUS.md is already a generated view over the same data, the real question is what a dashboard does that a file can't.

Catch-up progress

49/49

Why this matters to you

The roadmap scopes phase 3 at 3-5 sessions, done when 'capture on phone → auto-route → digest entry → decision approved from phone' works end to end. Without a sharp answer to what it adds over STATUS.md, that's 3-5 sessions of building a prettier version of a file you already generate.

Saturday's gen_status.py made STATUS.md a generated artifact — automation health, engine activity, active projects, open commitments, all read from the same events and ledgers a dashboard would read. That's a genuinely good outcome, and it raises the bar for phase 3. If the dashboard is the same data with better typography, it's decoration, and decoration is the thing that gets abandoned first because nothing depends on it.

There are three things a flat file structurally cannot do. It can't act — you can read that a decision is pending but not approve it where you're standing, which is exactly the gap phase 1's ntfy buttons started closing. It can't reconcile — this week's false green existed because the health check and the alert ledger live in separate files and nothing puts them side by side; a dashboard that shows both in one row makes the contradiction impossible to miss. And it can't compress time — a file holds one timestamp per job, while a dashboard can show a heartbeat as seven days of sparkline, which is how you'd have noticed the jobhunt sweep dying rather than reading OK next to it.

Act, reconcile, compress. Every one of those traces to something that actually went wrong this week, which is the right way to scope a build — not from a feature list but from the failures you can name. Anything on the phase 3 list that doesn't serve one of the three is a candidate for cutting, and cutting it is how 3-5 sessions stays 3-5 sessions.

Worked example

The comparison that scopes the work — read them side by side:

# What the file gives you today
head -30 /Users/tom/Claude/STATUS.md

# The same data, raw
cat  /Users/tom/Claude/PDB/data/alert-state.json
ls   /Users/tom/Claude/PDB/data/heartbeats/
ls   /Users/tom/Claude/PDB/data/jarbus-events/ | tail -5

# The three questions to hold it against:
#   ACT       — can I approve the pending decision from here?
#   RECONCILE — does health-check agree with alert-state, visibly?
#   COMPRESS  — is this job's last 7 days visible, or just its last run?

STATUS.md is the honest baseline. Phase 3 has to beat this, not beat nothing — and it's already good at the read-only job.
These are the same three sources the dashboard would read. Nothing in phase 3 requires new data collection; it's entirely a presentation and interaction problem.
Each question maps to a real failure from this week: the phone-approved sweep decision that never executed, the false green, and the sweep that died six days before anyone noticed.
If a proposed phase 3 feature doesn't answer one of the three, it's scope. Write the three at the top of the PRD and use them as the cut line.

▶ Do it now

Open PDB.zorc.app in one window and STATUS.md in another. Spend five minutes looking at both.
Write down the three questions you actually ask on a Monday morning that the file makes you grep or open a second file to answer.
Map each to act, reconcile, or compress. If one doesn't map, it's either a fourth category worth adding or scope worth cutting — decide which now, not mid-build.
Draft the phase 3 scope as those three capabilities and nothing else, and note explicitly what you're leaving out so future-you can tell deferred from forgotten.

Gotchas

Don't rebuild STATUS.md's read-only sections in HTML. Link to the generated file for those and spend the sessions on the three things it can't do.
Phase 1's acceptance test is still running until Aug 21 (Wednesday's lesson). Starting phase 3 before phase 1 is verified means building on a foundation you haven't confirmed holds.
Mission control is a monitoring surface for a system with one operator who checks in weekly. Design for the Monday-morning glance, not for a wall display nobody is standing in front of.

One-card takeaway

A dashboard earns its keep by doing what a file can't — acting, reconciling, and compressing time. Scope it to those three or you've built a prettier STATUS.md.

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