The dashboard reports totals that are true every day and actionable on none of
them. Meanwhile a bay returned 500 to every collector report for a day and a
half, eleven markers' backups overwrote each other for weeks, and GE-Enforce
records failures, stale manifests and repeated self-heals that surface nowhere.
Every one of those was found by someone going to look.
Two things found while writing this shaped it. The plugin mechanism already
exists - get_dashboard_widgets, an endpoint that aggregates across enabled
plugins and isolates failures, and five plugins declaring widgets. And nothing
consumes it: the frontend never calls the endpoint and not one of the declared
components was ever written. So this finishes a half-built feature rather than
starting one.
It also proposes fixing the contract while it is still unused. Naming a
component per widget does not survive a lean build, where a plugin's component
may not be staged into the bundle at all. ADR-010 already solved this for asset
panels - declare data and a render mode, let a generic core component draw it -
and the same three renderers cover every card listed.
The rest is principles that came out of this week: empty cards shrink, because a
card that says "nothing wrong" daily trains people to stop reading, which is how
a log reached 3,234 lines with 17 that mattered; every row links to the thing;
cards declare a permission so the dashboard cannot become a way around RBAC;
thresholds are settings with neutral defaults.
Wave one is six cards whose data is already reliable. Wave two is the valuable
one: diffing what a manifest says a PC should have against what it reports
having, which nothing answers today and which is what GE-Enforce exists to
guarantee.
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