Companion Dashboards

Pair your OpenHome Ability with a live web dashboard built on Replit.

Ambient AI deserves a screen. Companion dashboards are front-ends that render what your Ability sees — life logs, meeting summaries, sensor feeds, smart-home state.

The architecture in one sentence

Your Ability fires HTTP POSTs to a Flask server you host on Replit, which keeps the latest state in memory and serves it to a polling frontend.

OpenHome Ability   ──POST──▶   Replit Flask server  ◀──poll──   Browser dashboard
    (Python)                    (in-memory store)               (HTML + JS)

Pipeline in under 20 minutes

1. Decide what the Ability observes

   One thing — a room’s emotional tone, meeting takeaways, sensor readings. Resist adding more up front.

2. Scaffold the Ability in Live Editor

   Start from a template. Stub a main loop that prints what it sees.

3. Spin up a Replit

   Blank Python Repl. Flask server. One POST endpoint that echoes to the console. Copy the public URL.

4. Wire them

   Paste the URL into the Ability as DASHBOARD_URL. Add a fire-and-forget POST helper. Call from the main loop.

5. Prove the pipe

   Run both sides. Watch the packets land in both logs.

6. Build the frontend

   Once the pipe is proven, build the UI. The backend should never change again.

For the deep dive on rules, patterns, and snippets, see Build a Companion Dashboard.