The problem
I’d been coordinating a small team of AI agents — a project manager, engineers, a designer, a security reviewer — across several projects at once. The work was getting done, but I had nowhere to actually see it. Who’s active right now? What decisions are waiting on me? Which blocker is about to slip? It all lived in scattered reports and commit logs. I wanted a cockpit.
The approach
I built it in Next.js as a server-rendered dashboard that turns the team’s real activity — reports, decisions, blockers — into an agent feed, a decision queue, a blocker board, per-project health grades, and velocity charts.
The interesting problem was privacy. The real data is sensitive: security findings, private notes, internal decisions. It can never be published. So the public demo runs in a hard-locked demo mode — every data reader short-circuits to a synthetic snapshot before it can touch a real file, the write path is severed so nothing persists, and a build guard refuses to ship the public build unless demo mode is on. The real, full-data version stays local-only.
What shipped
A genuinely drivable demo. Sign in as a guest, approve a decision, triage a blocker, watch the agent feed update — all on synthetic data that resets each session. Fifteen roles, live status, seven-day insights, and per-project health scores, in light or dark.
Reflection
The build taught me that make it public and keep it private aren’t opposites. With the right seam, you can ship a faithful, interactive demo while the sensitive version never leaves your machine.
That separation turned out to be the whole design.
