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Rex St. John
toollive

Return To Office

An isometric office floor for running a fleet of agents — every agent at a desk, every project a room, every action written to an append-only record.

Next.js / W&B Weave / herdr

Problem

Agent observability is something you open when something has already gone wrong. I wanted the opposite: an interface I would open because I wanted to.

The underlying problem is sharper than aesthetics. A fleet of sixteen agents produces far more output than anyone can review, so the only question that matters is which two decisions need a person right now.

Solution

The fleet as an office floor. Each agent is a figure at a desk — Scribe, Researcher, Auditor, Lawyer, Prototyper — and each project is a room they move between. Who is working, who is idle, and where the two failing checks are, without reading a log line.

Underneath the game view it is unglamorous and real: an append-only record of every event, live traces and evals through Weave, a spawn bar that creates agents by role, and a queue of things needing a human to approve or reject.

Analysis

The queue is the actual thesis. Everything else on the screen exists to make one question answerable at a glance, and the isometric floor is not decoration — it is the thing that makes a fleet legible without reading it.

The honest risk is that a game view flatters the operator into feeling informed. The append-only record is the counterweight: the pretty layer sits on top of something auditable rather than replacing it.

Result

Sixteen agents across seven projects, with 12,176 events in the record and two things waiting on a human.

Screens

  • The Return To Office interface — an isometric office floor with agents at desks across several project rooms, a spawn bar of agent roles along the bottom, and a live event feed and approval queue down the right side
    Sixteen agents, seven projects, 12,176 events in the record. The queue on the right is the part that matters — two things waiting on a human.