Dancing Lights

Dancing Lights

Hang small moving signals in the dark so people can tell what the system is doing.

Sigil

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What This Skill Does

Use this spell for lightweight indicators: status pips, progress markers, heartbeat widgets, and ambient observability that help humans orient quickly. It is not a full dashboard strategy; it is the small visual cue that says where to look next. In this grimoire, Dancing Lights is treated as a hybrid spell with a shipping-now delivery profile. Canonical reference input: Dancing Lights (spell).

When To Use

• You need a lightweight status or progress display rather than a full observability buildout.
• A small ambient indicator would help people see health, motion, or blockage at a glance.
• The goal is orientation and reassurance, not deep analysis in a heavy dashboard.
• Your Home Assistant setup has Philips Hue or other smart lights that can serve as ambient status indicators.

Prerequisites

• Environment variables available to Hermes: HA_URL, HA_TOKEN.
• Primary credential or token: HA_TOKEN.
• Binaries on PATH: curl.

Setup

1. Confirm the required environment variables are available inside the active Hermes runtime, not just in a shell profile.
2. Verify the required binaries resolve on PATH before you rely on them in a procedure.
3. Choose a non-production or low-risk target first if the skill can page, unlock, alert, or touch a live integration.

Procedure

1. Restate the target, the success condition, and any no-touch boundaries before taking action.
2. Choose the minimum set of signals that actually matter at a glance.
3. Map those signals to simple visuals, placement, and refresh behavior that stay legible under stress.
4. Return the indicator spec with data sources, stale-state handling, and error states.
5. If Home Assistant is available, use the HA REST API to set light states directly — POST to /api/services/light/turn_on with entity_id, brightness, and rgb_color.
6. Package the result as the deliverables below, with confidence, assumptions, and unresolved risk called out explicitly.

Deliverables

• A compact status display concept or implementation brief.
• A signal-to-visual mapping for healthy, stale, and failing states.
• Notes on refresh cadence, placement, and what the indicator does not claim.

Pitfalls / Guardrails

• Keep the theatrical framing, but name the concrete mechanism that makes the skill useful right now.
• Do not imply precision or freshness the underlying data cannot support.
• Make stale, unknown, or disconnected states visibly different from healthy ones.
• Do not rely on a live integration until credentials, target scope, and rollback expectations are verified.

Verification

• Check that the result includes every deliverable promised above.
• Check that confirmed facts, assumptions, and inferences are visibly separated.
• Check which parts are concrete actions versus framing, so the user can tell what is real now.
• Check the required environment variables and binaries in the active Hermes runtime before trusting the procedure on a live target.

Example Invocation

/dancing-lights design a small status display for this workflow and make the signal states unambiguous