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The Dashboard (tab summaries)

Audience. Daily user running several agent tabs at once.

When to read this. You have eight terminal tabs open, three of them agents, and reading the tab strip tells you nothing about which one needs you.

The Dashboard summarises every open terminal tab into a card: a few-word title, what stage the work is at, where it lives, and whether it is waiting on you. It is off by default and needs an API key — see Turning it on.

Opening it

The Dashboard lives in the bottom band, next to Terminal — it is not a right-slot working surface, so it never displaces Code or Knowledge.

  • View → Show Dashboard, or Ctrl+Shift+D / Cmd+Shift+D.
  • The left terminal tab strip's first entry is a fixed Dashboard pseudo-tab. It cannot be renamed, closed, or dragged. Selecting it swaps the bottom band to the Dashboard; selecting any real terminal tab switches straight back; clicking it while it is already active closes the pane.

It is always present, even with summarisation off — the body then explains how to enable it.

The status line

One thin line above the cards:

Element Meaning
Power dot + label Off, On · no key, On · backoff (the engine is backing off after repeated failures), or On.
Tallies Total open tabs, then counts by state: working, awaiting, idle — plus error when any tab is in it.
updated HH:MM When the last summarisation cycle landed, or not yet run.
config Hover or focus it to reveal the live summariser config: provider, the card and writer models with their reasoning flags, the endpoint, the interval, the activity gate, skip-idle, and whether an API key is set or missing. The key itself is never shown.

A failed cycle would otherwise be a silent no-op — tab titles simply stop updating — so the last error is surfaced in a banner under the line.

The cards

One card per open tab, in the same order as the tab strip. The whole card is a link: click it to jump to that terminal tab.

  • State dot — working / awaiting you / idle / error.
  • Age — time since this card's last refresh. A card being recomputed right now shows a small pulsing marker.
  • Update — force an immediate re-summarisation of just this tab. Shown only when the engine can actually run (enabled, with a key), and disabled while that card is already recomputing.
  • Title + activity pill — a few-word title plus the work stage: Implementing, Designing, Reviewing, Making PR, Documenting, Testing, Debugging, Researching, Awaiting, Idle.
  • Breadcrumb — #app › wt:branch › project, only the segments that exist. Each is clickable: the app and worktree crumbs open their directory, the project crumb opens its README. When several projects match, the first is shown with a +N carrying the rest in its tooltip.
  • Subtitle — one sentence of context: what this work is and why.
  • Awaiting callout — when a tab is blocked on you, its blocking question is rendered as a tinted callout so it pulls the eye.
  • Recent actions — up to four events, most recent first, with relative timestamps.

A tab with no summary yet is never hidden. It falls back to a card drawn from its command and cwd, with the engine's next-attempt hint (in 45s, soon, pending) in the age slot and "Waiting for first agent output" as its subtitle.

Each tab refreshes on its own independent timer, in parallel with the others.

Turning it on

Everything lives under the dashboard key in the per-machine settings.json — a personal setting. Edit it through Settings → Dashboard (under Personal · this machine), or by hand.

The API key is a secret: it must live in the per-machine global file and never in a conception's .condash/settings.json, which is a versioned tree. The schema enforces that — dashboard is a global-only key and a conception file carrying it is rejected.

{
  "dashboard": {
    "enabled": true,
    "apiKey": "sk-…"
  }
}

That is the minimum. The rest has defaults:

Key Default Notes
enabled false Master switch. Off means nothing runs and no data leaves the machine.
provider deepseek The only provider for now; an enum so others can be added.
apiKey — Falls back to the DEEPSEEK_API_KEY environment variable.
baseUrl provider default Any OpenAI-compatible endpoint. Falls back to DEEPSEEK_BASE_URL. Blank uses the provider's own.
model deepseek-v4-flash The cheap "card" tier that extracts facts from raw tab output.
writerModel deepseek-v4-pro The richer tier that composes the published title + subtitle.
cardReasoning false Reasoning on the card tier.
writerReasoning false Reasoning on the writer tier.
cardInputChars 16000 How much recent tab output the card model sees.
intervalSec 120 Summarisation cadence, clamped to 30–300.
gateOnActivity true Skip a due tab's refresh when that tab produced no new output since its last summary. Per tab, not per cycle — one busy tab among nine quiet ones still gets summarised.
skipIdle true The narrower backstop under gateOnActivity: it applies only when the gate is off, and only to a due tab whose last card already read idle and whose byte count hasn't moved.
historyLimit 20 Retained events per tab and globally.

Full per-key detail: Config files → Dashboard.

What leaves your machine

With enabled: false — nothing. Nothing runs, and no request is made.

With it on, each cycle sends recent terminal output (up to cardInputChars per tab, plus the derived facts) to the configured endpoint. Every captured field is run through the same secret redactor as condash logs --redact first — one chokepoint before the POST, turning provider key prefixes, bearer tokens, JWTs, secret-named assignments, and PEM private-key blocks into «redacted:…».

That redactor is conservative by design and recognises only high-precision secret shapes, so treat it as a backstop, not a guarantee. Terminal output routinely carries secrets that don't match any of those shapes: pasted tokens, env dumps, curl -H lines. Treat enabling this the same way you would treat enabling disk logging — and if you want the summaries without a third party, point baseUrl at a self-hosted OpenAI-compatible gateway and set model / writerModel to ids it serves.

gateOnActivity is on by default, so an idle workspace makes no calls at all; skipIdle is the narrower backstop for when you turn that gate off.

See also