I Used AI to Build a Final Fantasy-Inspired Dashboard for AI Agents, Because Spreadsheets Are a Crime Against Morale

#ai #webdev #productivity #opensource

I am a Canadian realtor, not a career software engineer. That is probably why I had no emotional attachment to the normal way dashboards are supposed to look.

I had a practical problem. I was using different AI workers and tools for different jobs, but the screens used to monitor them all felt the same: grey tables, status labels, and a pile of information that technically existed but did not help me understand the team at a glance.

The best interface I could remember for understanding a team was not business software. It was a classic JRPG party menu.

The party-menu advantage

A good party screen answers useful questions immediately:

Who is in the party?
What role does each person have?
Who is active right now?
Who is running low?
What quest comes next?

That is almost exactly what I needed from an AI-agent dashboard.

So I built RPG Party Dashboard, using AI as the building partner. It is Final Fantasy-inspired in the broad classic-JRPG sense, but unaffiliated with Square Enix or any game publisher.

HP means Headroom Points

The most useful idea in the dashboard is the HP bar.

In this project, HP does not mean health. It means Headroom Points: a simple visual estimate of how much useful room a worker or conversation has left before the thread should be reborn into a fresh chat.

That turns an abstract technical problem into a signal I can understand instantly. Healthy worker? Green bar. Running low? Warning. Nearly done? Rebirth the chat before it falls apart.

Call it remaining capacity if you want to sound respectable. I will keep the HP bar.

Intentionally boring technology

The public version uses plain HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. There is no account, backend, build step, or framework dependency.

That was deliberate. I wanted someone to clone the project, change dashboard.config.js, and understand what they were looking at without first joining a religion based on package managers.

The public repo ships with fictional sample data. You can use the built-in CSS characters or point the configuration at licensed character art of your own.

AI was the building partner

I did not sit down pretending to be a career developer. I brought the operating idea, the business problem, the visual standard, and a willingness to keep correcting the thing until it felt right. AI helped with implementation, iteration, checks, and packaging.

That is part of the point.

Small operators can now build internal tools that fit how they actually think. We do not have to wait for a software committee to approve the colour blue or add a feature three quarters from now.