The four views

Why four views and not one chat

Almost every AI product today is a chat thread. That makes sense for one-on-one Q&A with a single assistant. It does not make sense for running a team. An AI company produces different kinds of updates — progress, reports, approvals, errors — and collapsing them all into a linear chat loses signal fast. Approvals scroll away under status chatter; long reports disappear; you cannot see what the whole team is doing without reading every message.

The four views split the stream. Each view has one job and one cognitive mode. You learn them once, use them forever.

1. Boardroom — the conversation

The Boardroom is where you talk to the CEO. It is a single wide conversation surface with the CEO on one side and you on the other. This is where you set goals ("launch a webinar in three weeks"), answer clarifying questions ("I'd prefer the price-on-request framing"), and have a longer back-and-forth when the CEO needs to understand something deeply.

The Boardroom is NOT where you see status. Status lives in the other views. Keeping the Boardroom clean makes it the place you go for real conversation, not the place you dread because it buries your last decision under a hundred progress pings.

2. Power Grid — the status dashboard

The Power Grid is a grid view of the whole company. Each cell is a specialist or a running task. You can see at a glance who is working, who is idle, what is in flight, and how each active task is progressing. For owners who like to keep a pulse on the team, this is the homepage. For owners who only care about outcomes, this view is rarely used.

3. Action Feed — the work stream

The Action Feed is where outcomes land. Each card is a finished piece of work: a deployed landing page, a drafted email, a sent send, an archived inbox batch. You scroll it like a timeline. You click into a card to see the artefact (the PDF, the URL, the Google Doc). The feed is also where the morning brief appears — "here is what the team did overnight" — and where report_ready cards queue up during the day.

4. Approvals Inbox — the decision queue

The Approvals Inbox is the one place where human attention is actually required. Every time the CEO needs a yes or no — "should I send this to the list?", "should I accept this contract?", "should I spend 200 credits on this optional step?" — a card lands here. You swipe: approve, reject, or ask for changes. When the inbox is empty, the team is unblocked. When it is full, your morning routine is this view.

Keeping approvals in a dedicated view is a safety affordance. Nothing externally visible happens without an owner touch on a card — and the inbox makes sure those cards cannot disappear under status noise.

Which view surfaces which event

The seven structured-card types map directly onto the views:

• Boardroom: free-form CEO messages; ceo_thinking traces; planning indicators.
• Power Grid: plan_execution_started and plan_execution_finished events; specialist activity.
• Action Feed: report_ready, milestone_reached, info.
• Approvals Inbox: approval_needed, decision_required, manual_task, error_alert.

How it works in Black Box

Each view is a React component in apps/web/src/views/ that subscribes to the same SSE stream of bb_event NDJSON lines from the API. The events carry a type field that determines which view picks them up; a single event can be rendered by one view or several, depending on importance. The split is enforced in the event router (apps/web/src/lib/useAgentEvents.ts), not in the engine — the engine just emits.

What a typical day looks like

You open Black Box in the morning. Approvals Inbox first — swipe through overnight decisions. Action Feed second — scroll the morning brief. Boardroom third — ask the CEO today's top goal. Close the tab; come back at lunch for the next round. This is the rhythm the four views are designed for: short, targeted visits, not all-day tending.

Frequently asked

Which view do I live in?

Action Feed in the day, Approvals Inbox in the morning, Boardroom for real conversation.

Why not one chat?

Chat collapses signal. Four surfaces give each kind of update the right shape.

Can I disable a view?

You can collapse or rearrange. All four remain available.

Is there a fifth?

Pulse exists for developer diagnostics. Not counted as a product view.

Related concepts

• Structured cards — the seven card types that populate the views.
• The CEO agent — the one agent you converse with in the Boardroom.
• Feature page: Power Grid.
• Feature page: Action Feed.
• Feature page: Approvals Inbox.