Motivation

The current UI works but there is room to make it both more visually compelling and more operationally useful. Great TUIs like htop, mactop, btop++, gh-dash, lazygit, and many others show what is possible in a terminal. Let's brainstorm how agent-viz can level up.

This is related to:

• Investigate finer-grained session status: running vs awaiting-user #121 — Finer-grained session status (running vs awaiting-user) would unlock richer visual states
• Revisit: what should "needs attention" mean? #187 — Revisiting what "needs attention" means feeds directly into dashboard design

Ideas to discuss

1. Sparklines & live graphs (inspired by htop/btop++/mactop)

• Token burn rate — mini sparkline showing tokens consumed over time per session
• Activity heatmap — show when sessions were active vs idle in the last hour
• Aggregate throughput — total tokens/min or commits/hour across all sessions

2. Better status visualization (relates to #121, #187)

• Graduated attention levels — color-coded urgency instead of binary attention (🔴 urgent / 🟡 warning / 🟢 info)
• Activity pulse — animated spinner or pulsing dot for truly active sessions vs static icon for idle
• Timeline bar — horizontal bar per session showing active/idle/waiting segments over time (like a Gantt chart)

3. Richer dashboard / mission control (inspired by WTF, Grafterm, dashbrew)

• Multi-pane layout — show session list + detail + logs simultaneously (like tmux splits)
• Summary stats bar — total sessions, active, idle, failed, tokens burned, PRs opened — always visible
• Session grouping — group by repo, by status, or by "needs attention" vs "cruising"

4. Better conversation view (inspired by messaging TUIs)

• Syntax-highlighted code blocks in agent responses
• Collapsible tool calls — show tool name + duration, expand for details
• Diff inline preview — show file changes right in the conversation flow

5. Kanban / board improvements

• Swim lanes by repo — see all sessions for a repo in one lane
• Card richness — show PR status, CI status, token count on each card
• Drag-to-prioritize — reorder sessions by user priority

6. Navigation & interaction (inspired by lazygit, k9s)

• Fuzzy search/filter — type to filter sessions by any field
• Command palette — / or : to access all actions
• Contextual actions — right-panel action menu for the selected session (resume, view PR, view logs, copy ID)
• Breadcrumb bar — show navigation path (Sessions > repo/name > Logs)

7. Visual polish

• Responsive layout — adapt columns/panes to terminal width
• Better use of color — status-based row highlighting, not just icons
• Box drawing — use unicode box chars for cleaner panel borders
• Progress indicators — show session progress if estimable (e.g., "3/5 plan steps done")

8. Real-time features (inspired by process-compose, otel-tui)

• Live log streaming — tail logs in a split pane while browsing sessions
• Auto-refresh with diff — highlight what changed since last refresh
• Desktop notifications — optional notify when a session needs attention (macOS/Linux)

What would be most valuable?

Not all of these are equal effort or impact. Would love input on:

1. What do you find yourself wishing agent-viz showed you?
2. Which of these would change your workflow the most?
3. Any TUIs you use daily that we should study for inspiration?

Technical notes

• We use Bubble Tea + Lip Gloss + Bubbles, which support all of the above
• Harmonica for animations, bubbles has sparkline-like components
• Data availability is a constraint for some features (see Investigate finer-grained session status: running vs awaiting-user #121) — we can only show what gh agent-task gives us