The audit · why this is not a repaint

What the page is
actually doing.

Measured from the running service and the real snapshot data, not from memory. The dashboard answers one question — what needs me today — and everything else on it is either evidence for that or clutter. Right now it does not take a position on which is which.

Measured

It is nine screens long on a phone.

Measure	Now
Page height, desktop at 1280px	4,943px — 5.5 screens
Page height, phone at 390px	7,331px — 8.7 screens
Real opens, 11 retained days	82 across ten days (1–20/day)
Anomaly excluded	one 453-hit day — a tab left open
Requests from an iPhone	123 of 535

Opens measured from the Caddy access log, excluding the page’s own background refreshes and keeping only real browser navigations. An earlier figure I had quoted was wrong; this replaces it.

Information architecture

Answer, evidence, or clutter.

Surface	Shows	Rows now	Duplicated elsewhere	Verdict
TODAY rail	kind chip, title, detail, fix-prompt, done / snooze / dismiss	12 items (8 live, capped at 5 + “3 more”; 4 commitments)	Yes, extensively	Answer
At a glance	Active 11, Needs attention 3, Shipped 2, snapshot age	4 cells	Pure rollup of the board’s own chips	Evidence
Project board	name, status, last activity, live dot, cron OK/FAIL, next action	22 projects across 7 status sections	Next action duplicated in Recent Work; cron FAIL in Automation; attention reason in TODAY	Evidence
Ask your chief of staff	free-text input and answer	0 rows until used	None	Clutter
Obligations	title, note, due chip	0 — permanently empty	Both real reminders are overdue and correctly shown in TODAY instead	Clutter
Recent work	next per project (12), recently active (13), taskboard todos (0)	25 rows	“Next per project” wholly duplicates the board’s next-action column	Mixed
Automation	failing / total / OK / flapping / unchecked, plus lists	~71 jobs	Both failing jobs duplicate TODAY rail rows	Evidence
Money	3 lines and an equity sparkline	3 lines	None	Evidence
Infra	load, disk %, up/down, down-host list	2 of 52 hosts down	Down hosts duplicate TODAY rail rows	Evidence
Twins	per-twin last feed, sleep, today	6 lines	None	Clutter*

* Twins is the only non-work signal on the page. It is clutter relative to the page’s stated question, which is an argument for changing the question rather than cutting the panel — your call.

The reason it is so long

One failure, rendered four times.

The Concord cron failure appears as a project attention chip, as the project’s next action, as a TODAY rail row, and as an Automation failing row. Four renderings of one fact. The Broven and Money Ideas flags do the same. And manual.next is duplicated wholesale for 12 of 22 projects — the “next per project” list in Recent Work is the same text as the next-action column on the board above it.

One panel can never show anything

The Obligations panel always renders “no upcoming obligations”. Both real reminders are overdue — by 38 and 35 days — and overdue items are filtered out before the panel is fed. It occupies space in order to say nothing. I would cut it rather than restyle it.

The page contradicts itself about one host

The Agent Store project reports its URL status as unknown for brovenhq.com, while the Infra panel independently reports that same host as down. Two different answers about one host, on one page. That is the class of bug the honesty affordances exist to prevent, so it gets fixed rather than carried across.

Generated but never rendered

projects.nextUp — five entries produced every snapshot; nothing has rendered them since the TODAY rail replaced that lane
memoryWrittenAt, cron.jobs, and the updatedAt stamps on money, twins and recent work
description — rendered on mobile, silently dropped on desktop

What must survive the redesign

Thirty-three honesty affordances.

Each of these exists because the dashboard previously lied in that exact way. The visual language is entirely replaceable; these behaviours are not. A redesign that makes them prettier but quieter is a regression.

Behaviour	Instances	What it says	Pinned by a test?
Evidence verdicts	7 places	`unasserted` / `no-evidence-source` / `fresh` / `confirmed` / `aging` / `stale` — only commits strictly after an assertion count as confirming it	Yes — whole-file coverage
Blind-spot warnings	8 places	“Root crontab not readable — production crons unmonitored”, “Systemd timers not readable”, and a Blind spots list on the rail	Yes
Flapping	3 places	“N flapping” and “last run passed, but N failure runs in the recent log”; counted out of the healthy total at a threshold of 3 episodes	Data logic only — no render test
Unchecked ≠ healthy	2 places	“N unchecked” chips, excluded from the healthy count whenever a job’s status is null	Data logic only — no render test
Panel error states	5 places	“Unavailable — {error}” badges, a distinct “Source broken” state, and money showing unreadable rather than a fabricated $0.00	None
Staleness	5 places	“Updated N ago” turning amber past 90 minutes; 48-hour stale thresholds on the ledger and twins feeds	None
Phantom automation new	1 place	“Declared automation X matches no cron job or systemd timer — it may not exist.”	Yes
Snooze fails open new	1 place	A snooze whose expiry cannot be read re-opens the item rather than hiding it forever	Yes
Reserved status green new	1 place	The OK green is reserved for real status only — the decorative masthead dot is explicitly forbidden from using it	None

The test suite would not catch losing any of them

There are no component tests in the repository at all — not one .test.tsx file. All 214 passing tests cover data logic underneath the UI. The flapping chip, the unchecked chips, the blind-spot header, the “source broken” state and every “unavailable” badge could be dropped in a rewrite and the suite would stay green.

So the first act of the build is to write those tests against the current design and watch them pass. Only then does the visual language get replaced. That turns the suite into a real gate instead of a green light.

Status colours, as meanings

Every hex value changes with the direction. The meanings carry over intact, including the rule reserving the status green for real status only — the decorative masthead dot is explicitly forbidden from using it.

Token	Meaning
ok	active, on-time, up — reserved for real status
warn	paused, hold, staleness, flapping
alert	needs attention, down, failing
info	shipped
idea	idea, not started
idle	idle, parked, archived
pin	pinned — deliberately not a status

Personal HQ redesign review · 8 August 2026 · built from branch worktree-redesign-2026-08-08. Nothing here is deployed; the live dashboard is untouched.