Overview

The page your mineral opens on: what your assistant knows, and how it is doing.

What your assistant knows and how it is doing.

This is home. Every card here answers one question, and the ones that need you are hoisted to the front rather than left in place.

The cards#

Before the cards load#

The page is honest about not knowing yet. While the first read is in flight you see grey placeholder cards, not stale numbers. If the mineral answers but has no dashboard to give (usually because it is brand new), the cards give way to one line: "No data from your mineral yet. It may still be onboarding. This page checks on its own, or press Refresh."

There is a third in-between state worth recognising. If your mineral could not rebuild its dashboard just now, the page shows the last version that did build, with a notice saying so: "this is the last good copy", with the timestamp it was made and the error your assistant can look into. A frozen dashboard that admits it is frozen beats one that looks live.

When your mineral will not answer#

If the connection fails, a panel replaces the cards with one of four headlines. Each means something different, and only some of them are worth waiting on:

• "Waiting for your mineral": the first few attempts. It may still be getting set up. The page keeps checking on its own; nothing you need to do.
• "Still no answer from your mineral": several checks in a row have not got through. Usually a network hiccup or a mineral mid-restart. Press Try again.
• "Your assistant is not running": the mineral itself is switched on and answering, but the assistant inside it has stopped. The panel says the honest thing: it will not come back on its own, and it cannot be restarted from this app. The technical detail the panel folds away underneath is what to report.
• "This computer has not been let in yet": the mineral is up and answering, it just does not know this computer. A machine that already opens the mineral is what lets a new one in: add another computer is the two-minute walk.

The banner and the hero#

Until onboarding is finished, a banner sits at the top: "Your assistant is ready to meet you." with the reassurance "Right here, nothing to install. One sign-in to Claude and you're talking." Its button opens the Terminal and runs a scripted introduction for you, so your first conversation starts without you having to know what to type.

Once onboarding completes, the banner goes and a hero strip takes over from the Assistant card: your assistant's name, large, and the button becomes "Talk to \<name\>". One primary action per screen, and it tracks where you actually are.

What to look at, and when#

In the first week, watch Onboarding. Until the interview is finished, every answer your assistant gives is generic, and no other card on this page can fix that.

After that, watch Health. It reports the jobs that keep your mineral current, including how updates reach you, and summarises the jobs your mineral runs by itself in one line before expanding to the individual jobs. It is the only card that tells you something is wrong before you notice the symptom.

"What your pebble can do" is the map of what is still switched off. Each row either says it is ready, or links to the thing that turns it on. Working down that list is a reasonable definition of setting your mineral up properly.

The health card in full#

The headline is one of four phrases, written for a person rather than an engineer (the raw status token survives in the detail line underneath, so nothing is hidden, just not shouted):

• "All good": nothing to do.
• "Not sure yet": the mineral has not reported a status yet.
• "Mostly working": something is degraded but retrying. It keeps retrying on its own; if it hangs around, mention it to your assistant.
• "Not working right now": a real failure worth a Refresh first, and worth reporting if it stays.

Under the headline sits "Checked N ago" (the exact time is on hover), then a one-line summary of the machinery: "3 jobs, all fine", or "1 of 3 needs a look". The per-job rows live behind that line in a fold which opens itself only when something is not ok, so a healthy card is three lines and a sick one shows you the failing row without a click.

The rows are the protected jobs from the jobs your mineral runs by itself, relabelled for humans: the heartbeat shows as "Status check-in", the update job as "Software updates", the backup as "Nightly backup". Each carries a chip: on, failed, opted out (updates switched off deliberately), or checking while the first report is still on its way. The backup row defers to the Backup card on Your pebble until it has a real run to answer for, rather than claiming a success it cannot show.

The capability ladder, concretely#

The "What your pebble can do" card has two halves. The left is three rungs, in order: "Sign in to Claude on your mineral", "Onboard your brain", "Make your first backup". The right is what those rungs open: run scheduled tasks, add another device, connect email and calendar, and message it on Telegram.

Every capability row is in exactly one of three states. Open, with the way in on the row itself. Locked, marked "Not yet", with the reason spelled out (scheduled tasks, for example: "Jobs run with nobody at the keyboard, so they need this mineral's own sign-in"). Or "Checking...", when the card simply has not read the answer yet. That third state is deliberate: ignorance never locks a row and never promises one, and the card re-checks about every minute until it knows.

The card's footer carries exactly one action: the way in for the first rung that is known to be unfinished. Not the first unknown one, because "we have not checked yet" is not something you can act on.

The two sign-ins that are not the same sign-in#

The single most common Overview confusion. Connecting the Claude Code desktop app signs in your laptop, which reaches into your mineral over SSH. That is an extra, not a step: it does not sign the mineral itself in, so scheduled jobs stay off and the ladder's first rung stays unticked however long the app is connected.

The mineral's own credential is written one way: open the Terminal tab and run claude once. The ladder says so on the rung ("Open the Terminal tab and run claude once. The desktop app signs in your laptop, not this mineral"), and its Open Terminal button lands you in the Terminal with the command already typed. Nothing to read, nothing to work out.

What refreshes, and how often#

You should never need to reload this page, because it checks on its own:

• Connection liveness: every 20 seconds, always, even after it has been green. A liveness dot that stops checking once it likes the answer would be worse than none.
• The dashboard data: every 60 seconds, but only while the window is actually being looked at and the connection is green. Rebuilding the dashboard means walking the whole brain on the mineral, and doing that for a hidden tab would be a walk for nobody.
• The machinery rows: within 2 minutes, on their own slower beat.

The Refresh button re-attempts the connection itself, not just the data. A mineral that is not connected yet needs exactly that, which is why the empty state points at it.

What this page is not#

It is not a dashboard you build. These cards are fixed and Crads AI maintains them, in the sense of who edits what. The pages you build for yourself are separate, and live under Your pages in the sidebar.

Your pages#

Those separate pages deserve a word here, because this is where you go looking for them. Your pages is a sidebar section that appears once your mineral has any: pages you and your assistant build together, by asking for them ("build me a page that shows X") through the Build pages & cards skill.

Each page carries its provenance. One your assistant seeded as a starting point wears an "Example page" chip. Every page has a Delete button, and the confirmation tells you what deleting means before you commit: an example page notes "Your assistant can make it again if you ask", any other page that "The page file is removed from your mineral", and both that it cannot be undone from here.

The guarantee that makes member-built pages safe to experiment with: a page renders in an isolated frame with no network access and no reach into the rest of the app. The only thing it may ask your mineral for is a read of your brain pages, read-only. So a badly built page, even one a misbehaving assistant wrote, can deface itself but cannot touch your data, your settings, or the outside world. The worst a bad page can do is look wrong, and Delete is right there.