Answers become live apps, not scrolling text: ask in chat, and the agent responds by composing a live widget onto your dashboard.

Part of the Modular Dashboard roadmap — see the tracker #101136 (Flagship section). Builds on Wave 1 (#101093; PRs #101094 / #101097 / #101098).

Problem

Today, an answer to "how's my token spend trending?" is prose that dies in the transcript. The dashboard substrate can already express the better answer — a live, bound chart — and the agent already has the tools to compose it (dashboard_tab_create, dashboard_widget_add, bindings). What's missing is the convention that makes answering-with-UI the default for show-don't-tell questions, plus the small affordances that keep it tidy.

What this adds

• The Living Answers convention: an agent-facing skill/doc — when a question is better shown than told, answer by composing a widget (chart, table, stat-card, custom) onto a designated Answers tab, bound live, and say so in one line in chat.
• ephemeral widget flag (schema): answer-widgets default to ephemeral with a TTL; a one-click pin promotes them to permanent. Keeps the Answers tab self-cleaning.
• A small default Answers tab convention (created on first use, createdBy provenance intact).

How it'd be built

Almost entirely prompt-layer + one schema field: add ephemeral?: { expiresAt: string } to the widget schema (extensions/dashboard/src/schema.ts) with store-side expiry sweep on read (extensions/dashboard/src/store.ts), a pin affordance in the cell menu (ui/src/pages/plugin/dashboard-view.ts), and the skill/doc describing the convention (the agent tools all exist since #101094). No new privilege, no new RPC.

References

• Modular Dashboard: agent-composable Control UI workspaces (tracking) #101093 / Modular Dashboard — Wave 2+ roadmap (tracking) #101136 — the substrate + roadmap this rides on.
• Dashboard: preview widget — live URL embed, dev-server preview, browser-backed inspection #101138 — preview widget: the same loop applied to code the agent is building.

Flagship — the chat↔dashboard loop, part 1 (answers). Pairs with the action-form issue (part 2: acting).