Dashboard Graph Visual Grammar

The runtime graph is the primary operating surface for Thane.

This document captures the semantic channels we want to use for graph nodes so the UI can grow richer without turning noisy or inconsistent.

Principles

Keep the graph alive and expressive.
Use circles for movable entities. The central runtime anchor may remain a square exception.
Avoid spending multiple meanings on the same visual channel.
Prefer light decoration over heavy badges.
Animate only active truth: work, sleep countdowns, alerts, delivery.

Core fill: entity family. Loop, delegate, channel, metacognitive, scheduled, and future resource or definition nodes should each live in a stable tone family.
Radius: capacity tier. Radius should reflect weighted context-window tiers, not raw proportional scaling. Fallback heuristics may use model size estimates when context is not yet known.
Primary ring: runtime state. Sleeping, waiting, processing, supervisor, degraded, stopped, and errored states should read from the outer ring first.
Halo: emphasis and role. Selection, supervisor emphasis, and other high-importance roles belong in halos, not in the core fill.
Rim badge/iconography: compact secondary truth. Small ring-attached badges are appropriate for capacity labels, delivery targets, trust indicators, and later policy/binding markers.
Underglow: inherited trust or channel context. This is the right place for soft trust-zone cues.
Motion: transient live activity. Pulses, flashes, shimmers, and directional edge motion should only happen when a real runtime change is occurring.

The current implementation slice moves toward:

This is an intentional shift away from shape-heavy encoding and toward a more durable circular node grammar that behaves well under force animation.