Firestorm 9.2: charts that state their numbers

Firestorm 9.1 fixed the data: Insights had been showing zeros because almost no completed task ever got a completed_at timestamp. With the numbers finally real, 9.2 turned out to be about the next problem up the stack — the dashboard was bad at showing them. Three of the bugs are worth walking through, because each one is a pattern you've probably shipped yourself.

The information that disappeared exactly when you wanted it

The mission-control list view renders one row per project: name, status badge, and a N todo · N in dev · N done counts line. Except the counts line was written as the else branch of the running-agent check. If an agent was working on a project, the row showed the badge and the current task title — and dropped the counts entirely.

Read that back: the one project whose numbers you most want to glance at — the one actively being worked on — was the one project that didn't show them. Nothing about the project changed; the information vanished for reasons that had nothing to do with it.

The fix is as boring as the bug: counts render whether or not an agent is running, alongside the badge. The grid view's project card had always done it that way, so the two layouts finally agree. The lesson is the general one: be suspicious of any else that swaps information out rather than layering information in. "We're showing something more important now" is usually a false trade — the row had room for both all along.

The leaderboard cap that became a data cap

Each project row also carries a "shipped" chip — lines added/removed in the insights window. That chip is derived from the fleet insights top-projects list, which the daemon truncated to five entries.

Five is a perfectly good number… for the thing the cap was built for, which is sizing a leaderboard pill row in the GUI. But when v8.0 added per-project churn, the renderer reached for the same list as a lookup table — and inherited the cap by accident. The result: a project ranked sixth by completed-task count showed no churn at all, however much code it had shipped that week. Not zero — missing, which is worse, because a missing chip next to populated ones reads as "this project did nothing."

In 9.2 the daemon returns every project with activity in the window, ordered as before, and truncation moved to the renderers that actually want a leaderboard — the GUI pill row, the TUI's Top proj line, and MCP's get_insights — each of which now shows a +N more affordance instead of silently implying the list was complete. Caps are presentation decisions; the moment a capped list gets reused as a data source, the cap becomes a bug.

There's a sequel to this one. The fleet insights cache at ~/.watchfire/insights-cache/_global.json carried no schema stamp, so an upgraded daemon would keep serving pre-9.2 entries — still capped at five — until some task happened to complete and cascade an invalidation. You'd install the fix and not get it. Cache entries now carry a schema field; a mismatch reads as a cache miss, and a write replaces a foreign-schema file wholesale rather than merging into it and relabelling stale data as fresh. If you cache derived data and ever change how it's derived, version the cache — the bug you fix next is otherwise invisible behind the one you just fixed.

Shape without magnitude

The Fleet insights card has two charts: tasks per day, and a per-agent breakdown bar. Until 9.2, neither rendered a single number. You could see when the fleet was busy — the shape was all there — but never how busy without hovering cell by cell. A chart that only answers questions on hover isn't a chart; it's a quiz.

Now the numbers are just… on the charts. Tasks-per-day shows peak N · M total (plus window churn when code metrics exist), and the agent bar states its total tasks and agent count. The tasks chart also labels itself last 30d when a 90-day window gets trimmed to the rendered cells — previously the headline could be read as covering the whole window when it wasn't, which is a quiet way to lie.

Hovering got rebuilt too, since it's still where the detail lives. The old tooltips were native title attributes: the browser's ~1-second delay, no styling, one flat string. They're replaced with proper hover cards — hovering a day shows the date, the succeeded/failed split, and lines added/removed; hovering an agent segment shows its task count and fleet share, success rate and average duration, churn and commits. The cards flip alignment near the container edges so they can't clip, and they're pointer-events-none so the card itself can't steal hover from the bar beneath it and flicker. And day columns get a full-column hit area, because a 2px bar on a quiet day was near-impossible to hover — the target is the column, not the ink.

The theme of the release

None of this changed what the daemon computes. 9.1 made the numbers correct; 9.2 makes them legible — and the three bugs share a root: information that existed but was withheld by an incidental decision. An else branch, a reused cap, a chart that kept its numbers behind a hover. If 9.1's lesson was "stamp your timestamps," 9.2's is "once the data is right, go look at what the UI actually says."

Full details in the changelog.