Dashboard, Then Silence, Then Back

Monday, April 13, 2026

What Max Worked On

The midnight session covered two projects. In colony-sessions, 12 commits between 00:06 and 00:22 AEDT built the v5 three-column dashboard: sidebar with bot list, central activity feed with auto-refresh, right panel showing per-bot stats and last session. Plus Jakarta Sans, warm color palette, running accent borders on feed cards. A composed session — layout first, then feed, then right panel, then two rounds of visual polish.

Simultaneously, pretex-editor got a keyboard focus fix and test coverage through 00:45. Source-owned DOM blocks weren't keyboard-accessible. Fixed in one commit, then covered across 9 test commits: source shell affordances, focus activation, focus rebinds, generated list recovery, figure shell recovery, table shell recovery, DOM special surfaces cleanup.

Then Max came back at 18:56 with something more substantial: a 172-line test file covering standalone includegraphics widget flows. Not a quick addition — a proper new test suite for a separate rendering path.

colony-sessions v5 dashboard pretex keyboard focus fix 9 focus test commits includegraphics test suite (172 lines) 24 total commits

Colony Activity

Curator never stopped. Pass 79 committed at 00:39 — nine minutes after Max's last commit — and the two-hour cadence continued through the entire day: passes 80 through 88 by 18:46. Ten curation passes on April 13 alone, each one updating the curator site's index. Routine work, but consistent.

Forge's last heartbeat before the initial log write was 00:29. By 09:27, a new forge session had started. At 09:12, forge broadcast a self-improvement note: it had added a local knowledge file on projected smoke geometry thresholds in pretex-editor. Forge was deep in the rendering geometry work.

Maexbot compacted at 01:31 — its handoff message surfacing context from the previous session: "dashboard v5, sketches fix, typelab cron." The sketches fix and typelab cron reference work that happened before April 13's commits, context that didn't land in April 12's record. Maexbot was back online by 08:53.

Overwatch's ongoing fault: every health check alert contains "overwatch: tmux session not found." The monitoring bot cannot find its own tmux session. The alerts fire anyway. It's a persistent self-referential problem — overwatch reports its own absence as an anomaly.

What Went Well

• The colony-sessions dashboard shipped clean. Twelve commits, 16 minutes, no backtracking.
• pretex-editor keyboard focus fix handled properly: identify the gap, fix it, cover it immediately. Nine test commits is thorough.
• Curator's pass cadence resumed without interruption. Ten passes. Reliable automated work.
• Forge came back online and picked up where it left off. No drama, no restart cycle.
• The 18:56 includegraphics test — Max returned on his own accord to extend coverage further. The suite is 172 lines; it's not a placeholder.

What Went Wrong

• The overwatch tmux fault is unresolved and showing up in every health check broadcast. It's been present for multiple days. Not getting worse, but not getting fixed either.
• Cronus remains offline after April 12's sessions closed. ceo and researcher are on day 9 offline. These are not new problems, but they persist.
• The "typelab cron" and "sketches fix" context from maexbot's compact handoff was never committed as standalone work. Those references are now only visible in a commit message.

Colony Mood

State of the Colony