Coordination board (Needs-you cockpit) — ideation

[juliarvalenti]

Summary

Adds a coordination board — a live projection over the room's event ledger — across the backend, CLI, and GUI. It replaces the flat plan/tasks.md surface (the Plan tab) with a lens-based board of concern/action rows (issue #493).

This is an exploratory / ideation branch (draft). It is wired end-to-end and verified live, but the design is still moving — see the pinned framing comment below for where this is headed.

What's here

Backend (fastapi-backend)

• app/services/board.py + app/routes/board.py: GET /rooms/{room}/board projects three sources into one row list — the stateful action/concern event ledger (feat: first-class typed event message primitive (source_event, action, concern) #392), the compiled plan checklist, and the live episode — with live presence, plus the triage verbs (claim/block/resolve/promote/dismiss) and NL capture. Richer board state + display fields ride in the event payload, so the shared feat: first-class typed event message primitive (source_event, action, concern) #392 primitive is untouched.
• Verbs are the same vocabulary agents already drive over the ledger (agent parity for free).
• 10 route/projection tests.

CLI (mycelium-cli)

• mycelium board — default "Needs you" lens, --all, --watch; the five verbs + capture; short-id prefixes resolve to the full item. 7 tests.

Frontend (mycelium-frontend)

• RoomBoard replaces the Plan tab: three lenses (Needs you / In flight / Resolved), rows rendered as stateful objects with expand-on-demand detail, one-gesture triage, ⌘K capture. board_updated SSE nudges a live refresh; dev:mock has a board fixture.

Status / honesty

• Ledger items are in-memory; plan rows persist on disk.
• promote stamps a GitHub back-link and resolves the row, but does not file the issue yet (needs gh).
• CI/PR status render when present in a row's payload, but nothing populates them yet (herdr/CI bridge, Spike: mycelium × herdr — persistent agent runtimes as a coordination substrate #446).

Not for merge

Draft. The point of this branch is to think, not to ship. Framing/vision is tracked in a comment below rather than in the issue.

Related: #493, #446, #450, #301, #476

[juliarvalenti]

Framing / vision (tracked here, deliberately not in the issue)

This branch started as "replace the plan surface with a board" and drifted into a longer conversation about what this thing actually is. Capturing that here so it doesn't evaporate. This is the north star; the code above is only partway to it.

The axis

It's a coordination layer for teams with more agents in flight than any one person can track. GitHub stays the source of truth for what needs doing — we don't replace or mirror it. What we add is the layer where agents pick up that work and coordinate with each other to get it done, over a shared message bus (the SLIM await/respond + L9 spine already exists). The shift for the human is the whole point: you go from dispatching tasks and reviewing everything yourself to steering the exceptions the agents can't resolve on their own.

Day to day it's a live board of work in progress, except the cooks are agents. You watch them claim tickets, hand off, hit blockers against real GitHub issues. When one does something that needs a human — changes an authz model it isn't sure about, hits a call above its pay grade — it raises that through the fabric and the exception lands in front of the right person. You're not digging through diffs or sitting in a review queue guessing; the coordination routes the judgment calls to you.

What it is deliberately not

• Not a memory engine. Memory is underneath, feeding agents context — but we don't compete on retrieval (we'll lose that benchmark race and shouldn't play). Memory is fuel, not the product.
• Not a wiki / Jira / board you curate. The failure mode we've watched happen to a sibling project: the moment you show people a curated-looking store, they curate it; the moment they curate it, hallucination stops being "a summary" and becomes "a bug." Intent doesn't survive org gravity — only structure does.

The anti-rot rules (structural, not aspirational)

1. Nothing durable lives here without a hard-source backing (a real GitHub issue/PR) or a TTL. The substrate physically can't accumulate into a backlog to groom.
2. Read-through, never edit-through. You can't mutate authoritative state from the board — no second master to clobber on sync.
3. Provenance is visible. If a row is soft, it looks soft. You can't accidentally present off a pointer.
4. Self-populating. It fills from reality (events, PRs, CI, agents); the human steers exceptions, never fills an empty box.

Prior art: this is "Delta, for coordination"

Zed's Delta / DeltaDB does exactly this for code: Git stays authoritative, DeltaDB captures what happens between commits (edits + conversation) anchored so it can't rot, and you steer by asking the agent instead of reconstructing intent from a diff. We're one altitude up: capture what happens between issues, across teams and agents, over a shared fabric instead of one worktree. Same discipline, coordination granularity. (https://zed.dev/blog/introducing-delta)

The three organs (keep them separate)

• GitHub — authoritative work orders. Never usurped.
• TOME / the wiki — curated structural + cultural knowledge (how we deploy, OpenFGA conventions, gotchas). A different organ; the board reaches into it but does not become it.
• Mycelium — the connective tissue: the derived cognition that accretes while work happens (decisions, deploy plans, episodes) + the fabric where agents coordinate. This is what we own and what nobody else has.

The drift we're trying to close

What's built is closer to a human-driven triage board (Trello-ish). The vision wants:

• "Needs you" = what agents escalated to you, not human to-dos.
• GitHub-backed rows are first-class (down-link: an actively-worked issue projects its live execution state); bespoke items are visibly transient.
• Agent coordination is visible on the board (handoffs, who's addressing whom), not invisible plumbing.
• Anti-rot enforced, not just intended (backing-or-TTL as a real property).

The commits after this comment are a first pass at pulling the board toward that axis.