← Spiral How it works

The board

Six surfaces, three depths. Organised around the film, not the agents: departments appear as notes in the margins of the work they argued about.

five seconds glance what is happening?

Board — the four gates, the shot strip, a status word per department, the live feed

the default

five minutes read why did that happen? what can I change?

Margins — every flag, ruling and offer anchored to the artifact it concerns
Call sheet — the asks, the offers, the guesses taken on your behalf
Render sheet — what to render, and accept / reject per take
Dailies — the digest at each gate close

the arguments in plain language, on the work

as long as it takes audit what did it see when it decided?

Inspector — the bundle, the causation chain, the ledger, the scrubber, the raw event

for tuning the council, or proving what happened. Never the default.

Departments never get their own screens. They appear as annotations in the margins of the artifacts they argued about, the way a script supervisor’s notes sit on a page.

Whoever opens the screen has one of three questions: what is happening, why did that happen, what can I change. Every surface answers one of them and links to the other two. The tension in every agent interface is transparency against overload: explain everything and nobody can read it; explain nothing and nobody trusts it. The answer is depth on demand.

The six surfaces

Board. The four gates with their round; the shot strip (or the beat strip at ideation) with seconds; every artifact as a chip with its version and its open flag count; the seven departments down the left with one status word each: leads · seen all 10:44, stale: script v5, 2 questions for you; a card that says what the council needs from you now, with the one button that does it; and the convergence table.

Margins. Any artifact, rendered as itself: the script as a page, the bibles with swatches and reference prompts, the shot list as a table, with every flag, ruling, offer and self-revision request anchored to it in the margin, and the department’s own rationale and critic scores underneath. Every version, with a why? that opens the event that produced it.

Call sheet. The Producer’s inbox: the treatments to choose between, the asks with their four fields, the offers with previews, the guesses taken on your behalf. One tap takes a guess; one line changes it.

Render sheet (production) and Edit sheet (post). What to render and how, with accept, reject and skip per item; then the timeline, the mix and the delivery checklist.

Dailies. The recorder’s digest at each gate close, in a form you can read in two minutes.

Inspector. The developer view: the selected event with its actor, cost, bundle and causation chain; the scrubber; the ledger by department; the failures; export and import of the whole log. Never the default.

The live feed

The right-hand column is the log itself, newest first, with the trace events dimmed: commits and locks in one colour, flags in another, rulings, offers, asks, failures. Click any line and the Inspector opens on it. Streaming the work, not just the result, is the single change that builds trust fastest.

The controls that matter

The design names four. Autonomy per department per gate, a slider from “ask me for everything” to “take the guess and tell me later”, which departments earn. Undo everywhere, as a compensating event, so undo is itself auditable. Approvals with accumulated context, so an ask never arrives bare. Interrupt without restart, because every activity is durable. The prototype has the third in full, the second for guesses and offers, and the first two as mandates rather than sliders. The fourth needs durable execution.