Power Grid
A live board of every tool, connection, and specialist your team depends on. Green = running. Yellow = needs you. Red = broken. Traffic lights, not a log file.
How it works
The Power Grid pulls from two places. First, the
connections RPC domain in
apps/api/src/connections/ — it verifies OAuth
tokens and API keys for GitHub, Railway, Google, Stripe,
Apollo, and friends, returning a status and a short message.
Second, the circuit-breaker snapshot — every active specialist
task with its live counters (tool calls, token spend,
duration, idle).
The UI refreshes regularly and updates tiles as new events come in. When a Skill Pack is installed, its required services (e.g. Apollo for Lead Gen Bootstrap) are appended to the grid. When a specialist emits a heartbeat, its tile lights green. When the breaker trips, its tile flips red.
The design contract from USER_JOURNEY.md: every
Power Grid entry has a color, a one-sentence status, and a
single actionable button. If an entry is yellow because
"Apollo API key missing," the button says Paste your
Apollo key, not View logs. The goal is to keep
the owner\'s troubleshooting path one click wide.
Skill Pack installs can surface multiple yellow cards at once (Lead Gen Bootstrap needs both Apollo and SmartLead keys before it can run), so the grid groups related blockers and lets the CEO coordinate which to surface in the Inbox first.
What you see in the UI
The Power Grid view is a stacked layout of service tiles. Each tile has the service name, a colored dot, a one-line status ("Connected as sarah@example.com", "Token expired — reconnect"), and a ghost button. Tiles group by category: Integrations, Specialists, Skills, Platform.
On the Home view, a condensed Power Grid strip shows only the non-green tiles — the ones that need your attention. Everything green collapses into a single "12 services healthy" chip.
A concrete example
You install Lead Gen Bootstrap. The Skill Pack installer
registers Apollo and SmartLead MCP servers. The Power Grid
updates: two new yellow tiles — "Apollo — API key required"
and "SmartLead — API key required." The CEO, seeing those
yellows, emits a manual_task card: "I need your
Apollo API key to start scraping leads — here\'s where to
find it." You paste the key. Tile flips green. The CEO
proceeds.
Technical details
The connections domain exposes handlers like
github_verify, railway_verify,
google_verify — each probes the remote API
(trivial read-only call) and returns a structured status
{status, message, actionHint}. Results
are cached briefly to avoid hammering providers and streamed
to the front-end through the same event channel as agent
activity.
The specialist tiles read from the circuit-breaker snapshot (see the breaker). Active tasks show their per-task counters and a "running for Ns" timer. Idle counts decrement toward the 300-second timeout in real time.
Related features
- Circuit breaker — the data source for specialist tile colors.
- Action Feed — where yellow-tile resolutions get logged.
- Skill Packs — pack installs add tiles to the grid.
Related concepts
FAQ
What counts as a Power Grid entry?
Every connected service the team can act through: GitHub, Railway, Google (Gmail/Calendar/Drive), Stripe, Apollo, SmartLead, plus internal subsystems like the CEO loop, the proxy, and the Supabase session store when enabled.
Is this a replacement for a status page?
It's your private one. It tells you the health of your team's integrations specifically, not a third-party global status. If your GitHub token expired, that's yellow in your Power Grid before it's ever mentioned on a public status page.
Why use traffic lights instead of detailed metrics?
Because you're the owner, not the on-call engineer. Black Box's design brief is "no JSON, no logs, no terminal." A colored circle + a one-sentence status + a single action (reconnect, retry, dismiss) is the UX for a non-technical owner.
What happens when a Power Grid item turns red?
The CEO gets notified in the same turn and routes around the broken service when possible. If the task can't proceed without it, the CEO emits a manual_task card asking you to reconnect. Nothing fails silently.
Try Black Box
One glance at the Power Grid tells you whether the team is shipping or waiting for you.