Ground Control.

You start an agent and go somewhere else — email, Slack, a review, a question from the desk behind you. That is the whole point of starting it. The work is supposed to happen while you are not watching.

Then it goes wrong in one of two directions, and they point away from each other.

The question was whether Ground Control could answer an agent for you, from your phone. Approve or deny is the easy half — clean, no tricks needed.

But approve and deny are not what you need to send. You need words: use Postgres, not SQLite. The only route to words was scripting the terminal directly. That was tested, deliberately, to find out whether it could be done. It can.

Which is exactly where it stops. A yes tapped on a lock screen is not the same yes — you cannot see the working directory, or the diff, or what the last three approvals already unlocked. And approvals chain: each one clears the way for the next.

✦ No relay was ever built. Anything that can type into your terminal is a remote execution capability, and putting a relay in that path would have turned one compromised server into every Mac connected to it. Some of that could be mitigated. None of it belongs in an app whose whole job is to tell you something needs you.

It would have been the easiest thing here to sell.

Every session gets an avatar, and the avatar has moods.

Across the title strip, a little dot-matrix display — the kind that lived on the front of a 90s hi-fi. When nothing needs you, it scrolls.

WinAmp skins were the last time a mainstream utility assumed you would want to make it yours. Everything since has assumed you want it to look like everything else.

The retro pull is not nostalgia for its own sake. It is nostalgia for a period when software let you fiddle.

So this is not a bonus bolted onto a serious tool. A monitor only works if you keep it open, and you keep open what you like looking at. The skins are load-bearing.

A theme starts from a nine-grid frame — the picture cut into a three-by-three. The four corners hold their size, the four edges stretch one way, the middle fills the rest. It is the trick behind every resizable window chrome, and the brief walks the model through drawing to it. Most people, or the model working for them, handle the default fine — background transparency and all, like this.

The easier way, if you want it: hand over one picture and let the whole thing scale to fit. Any proportions — the panel takes your picture's shape and the rows scroll inside it. Nothing to measure. A whole theme in an afternoon with no idea how any of it works.

The brief it writes is long. Every file, every size, each state and what it has to communicate, and the drawing rules for whichever route you picked.

Animation has two routes, and it tells you the trade. Frame-by-frame is cheap and jitters a little — right for a small detail, a blink or a glint. Full video holds the subject steady and costs tokens — right for a whole character or object. Either way, nothing animates until you have signed off on it as a still, so a wrong idea costs a picture and not a movie.

Those rules are not style advice. One animation came back with frames varying seventeen pixels in height, which on screen read as the panel resizing while it played — so the brief now says lock the silhouette, and never draw a frame from the previous one, because that drifts. Another grew heavier as it went and then snapped back at the wrap — so it says close the loop. At avatar size an expression is invisible, so a state has to be carried by colour and shape.

Try this in...

This one was made with Grok Imagine, a product of xAI — one of many models the brief works with. No affiliation.

What was typed to get the Commander

Roughly the brief behind the walking figure on the left. Every vague word is a regeneration you pay for, so the ask pins the path, the framing and the format — the tool fills in the file list.

• Ask for a truly transparent canvas — real alpha, not a keyed-out green or magenta screen. Soft edges, glow and haze then composite cleanly.
• Compose the subject toward the corner it anchors to: a bottom-right piece sits bottom-right on its own canvas, since that is the point the panel lines up with the window.
• The file draws at its exact pixel size, never scaled. Pick the size you want on screen, then double it for a sharp Retina render.
• Keep motion short — 8 to 24 frames near 12fps. It plays only while a session works, and holds on frame one otherwise.
• Save it as .apng or .png, never .gif. No removeBackground key needed when the alpha is already real.