I loved the idea.
I hated the execution.

By November my AI team and I had built more apps than I could keep in my head. A family dashboard. A civic notebook. A karaoke studio. A network map. A game label. Game tools. Pattern builders. Each one lived in a different folder and started a different way, and some of them only mattered when something went wrong.

Then there were the jobs that run on their own: the nightly syncs, the mailboxes the agents check, the watchdogs on the kids’ TV box. Forty-two of them. I had no single place that told me which ones were alive.

So the ask was simple. One page on my own PC. Every app, every automation, a live light for each, and an Open button that starts the real thing. Codex (OpenAI’s agent team, my other crew) built the server and the checks, and that part has been solid from day one.

Codex’s first finish was a patchbay, all cables and plates. I turned it down. The second one, on November 11, was a 3D isometric city called Signal City: thirteen little blocks on a beige board, one per category, with a tiny flag on every building. I liked that idea a lot. A city is a good way to hold forty things, because you remember where you left them.

And then I used it.

Here is what I wrote that night, lightly tidied. I liked the concept. In execution I hated it. The navigation was awful. The only way to zoom was a small, thin “Reset view” link in the corner. It had no personality. The color palette was yuck. Everything was spread too far apart. The fonts were too small and too thin. And the long horizontal rows had me turning my head back and forth like I was watching tennis.

One more thing, and it turned out to be the big one: the automations and the apps were mixed into the same screens. The apps are things I use. The jobs are things I watch. I wanted them apart.

Claude (Anthropic’s agent, my design-side crew) took that list and gave me options to pick from instead of a guess. I chose a dark look called Night City, and a separate screen for the jobs.

Claude rebuilt the town in one page with Three.js. Thirteen categories became seven districts, and each district got its own kind of building so you can tell them apart from across the map: towers for the business district, studios with pointed caps on Studio Row, houses with roofs on Home Street, theaters with domes for Showtime, a factory yard with sawtooth roofs for the Workshop. Every lit window is an app, and the window’s light is the app’s status.

The zoom was the first thing I asked for and the first thing I tried. Scroll or pinch to zoom, drag to move, big + and - and home buttons, number keys for the districts. The type got bigger and heavier. The rows went away.

I loved it, right up until I clicked a building. A side menu slid out, and it was very lukewarm. And the jobs screen, The Works, was kinda vanilla. Two more rounds.

The fix for the lukewarm side menu was to get rid of it. Now when you click a building, the camera glides over to it and a card pops up right above it, like a storefront sign. The app’s name, its light, one line about what it does, a big Open button, a folder button, and Prev and Next so you can walk the whole district without going back to the map.

On a phone the same card becomes a bottom sheet, and the district list turns into chips along the bottom. Drag, pinch, tap a building.

The automations got their own screen, and the vanilla version became a train-station departure board. Each row is a job: the time of its next run, its name and where it runs, and a status that flips like real flap tiles: ON TIME, NEEDS YOU, PAUSED, NO SIGNAL. Rows that need me flash at the top. It fits, because the schedules really are timetables. The only thing missing is the clack.

I caught a bug on the first look: every single job was tagged BUSINESS. Claude had read a “worth watching” flag as “this is business.” Fixed. Now only the real business jobs carry the tag, and the rest are just jobs.

How it is built

One page of Three.js, served by the hub’s existing local Python server. System fonts only, because the hub’s security rules allow no font files. No new routes, no new dependencies, no change to the checks or the Open button. It works on a phone, and if the 3D scene can’t start, it falls back to a plain list of every app.

Why a city, still

Because it worked the first time, even when I hated looking at it. I know where the karaoke studio is. It is on Showtime, under the sun. I know the network map is on Home Street. A list would never give me that.

Checked so far

The live hub renders the town and the board on the desktop with zero console errors. I used the town, the card and the board myself on the PC on November 11 and 12, which is where every note on this page came from. The lights and the Open button are the same server code Codex shipped and checked. Every picture here was taken from a preview copy with a script, at desktop and phone widths, with no page errors.

Not proven yet

How it feels on a real phone over weeks, not minutes. Whether the split-flap board is still fun in December. The checks are read-only probes, so a light says what the hub could see, not that every app is healthy inside. And nobody has measured the frame rate on a slow machine.