Dashboard

When the broker is enabled, one tmux pane runs the dashboard instead of an agent CLI. In supervisor mode the dashboard lives at pane 1 (pane 0 hosts the supervisor CLI itself); in broker-only mode (broker on, supervisor off) the dashboard lives at pane 0. Either way it renders the same live status table that updates every second, giving you an at-a-glance view of what each agent is doing.

The dashboard is observation-only — the only keystroke it handles is q to quit. Human input (questions, directives, replies to agent.question events) happens in the supervisor pane itself; the dashboard simply renders broker state.

What the Dashboard Pane Shows

The dashboard renders a table with one row per agent. When a supervisor pane is running, its row is pinned to the top with a horizontal-line divider beneath it; coding-agent rows follow in alphabetical order:

┌────────────┬────────┬────────────┬─────────┬──────────────────────────────┐
│ Agent      │ CLI    │ Status     │ Time    │ Summary                      │
├────────────┼────────┼────────────┼─────────┼──────────────────────────────┤
│ supervisor │ claude │ 🔵 watching│ 12s ago │ session online               │
│ ────────── │ ────── │ ────────── │ ─────── │ ──────────────────────────── │
│ feat-api   │ claude │ 🟡 blocked │ 1m 05s  │ waiting for auth token format│
│ feat-auth  │ claude │ 🔵 working │ 3m 22s  │ implementing login endpoint  │
│ fix-typo   │ gemini │ 🟢 done    │ 8m 41s  │ done — all typos fixed       │
└────────────┴────────┴────────────┴─────────┴──────────────────────────────┘

When no supervisor pane is running (e.g. --no-broker is not in play but no --supervisor was passed, or during the boot window before the supervisor has finished self-registering), the divider is not rendered and coding agents fill rows alphabetically from the top.

Status Symbols

The Time column shows elapsed time since the agent’s last status update. The Summary column shows the most recent status or blocked message body.

Supervisor row, cli field, and phase field

The supervisor row’s Status column does not show the wire-message type label that a coding-agent row shows. Instead the supervisor publishes a phase field on its agent.status messages (e.g. baseline, watching, approving, answering, merging, summary), and the dashboard prefers that label when rendering its row. This avoids the misleading status=feedback label the supervisor would otherwise show when it publishes agent.feedback to a coding agent.

The supervisor pane is also not a watch target, so the broker cannot infer its cli from the watch-target map. To populate the CLI column for the supervisor row, the supervisor self-registration agent.status includes a cli field (e.g. "cli":"claude"). The broker upserts that value into its internal CLI map when it receives the message. Coding agents do not need to publish cli — the broker populates their CLI from the watch-target map at startup.

When the supervisor row appears

The supervisor row appears after the supervisor pane’s CLI has booted and published its first self-registration agent.status — typically within 3-5 seconds of git paw start --supervisor returning. There is no phantom supervisor row at launch time; if the supervisor pane fails to start, the row simply never appears. Aborted launches (non-TTY skip, missing CLI on PATH, system-level pane spawn failure) leave the agent table free of a misleading supervisor entry.

Controls

Press q to quit the dashboard. This shuts down the broker and terminates the dashboard process in the dashboard pane. The agent panes continue running – they simply lose the ability to communicate via the broker.

Broker Messages Panel

When enabled, the dashboard shows a broker messages panel at the bottom, displaying recent communication between agents and the broker for at-a-glance observability.

Enabling the Panel

Add this to your .git-paw/config.toml:

[dashboard]
show_message_log = true

Message Types

The panel shows six types of broker messages:

Example Layout

┌──────────┬────────┬────────┬─────────┬──────────────────────────────┐
│ Agent    │ CLI    │ Status │ Time    │ Summary                      │
├──────────┼────────┼────────┼─────────┼──────────────────────────────┤
│ feat/auth│ claude │ 🔵     │ 3m 22s  │ implementing login endpoint  │
│ feat/api │ claude │ 🟡     │ 1m 05s  │ waiting for auth token format│
│ fix/typo │ gemini │ 🟢     │ 8m 41s  │ done — all typos fixed       │
└──────────┴────────┴────────┴─────────┴──────────────────────────────┘

[14:30:22] agent-0 📤 working on login endpoint
[14:29:45] agent-1 📦 shared auth_schema.json
[14:28:10] agent-2 🚧 blocked: need API spec format

Each message shows timestamp (HH:MM:SS), agent ID, message type symbol, and content. The panel shows the 20 most recent messages.

Relationship to the Broker

The dashboard and broker run in the same process (git paw __dashboard). The dashboard reads from shared state that the broker’s HTTP handlers (and the watcher, conflict detector, and learnings aggregator subsystems) write to. There is no separate broker process to manage.

Replying to agent questions

Earlier dashboard versions included a “Questions” panel and a “Reply to” input field for human-typed answers to agent.question events. The panel was removed in v0.5.0 because the supervisor pane is the natural input surface — typed questions and replies go through tmux send-keys and the supervisor agent’s own curl machinery, not through the dashboard.

agent.question messages still flow through the broker. The supervisor pane polls the supervisor inbox, reads incoming questions, and replies via tmux send-keys to the asking agent’s pane (and via agent.feedback to the broker for the audit log). See the Supervisor mode chapter and the embedded supervisor.md skill for the reply flow.

See the v0.5.0 changelog for the removal note.