Overcast Situation Room

overcast-situation-room

Use this skill to "monitor the situation": put a live, self-updating multi-panel page over a case — wall tiles, a reverse-chron scan/monitor feed, a live GPS map, and refreshing webcam/browser stills — so an operator watches the case evolve in real time. Use the broad overcast skill and overcast/reference/verbs.md for exact flags.

Hard rule — opening the listener is an OPERATOR action. The agent NEVER runs overcast situation / serve — starting a network listener is an operator act (invariant #10). A human runs overcast situation in its own terminal pane, or /situation on in the TUI (in-process, bound to the session). The agent only drives a page that is ALREADY running, via situation status | set | stop.

Workflow

1. Pick and verify the sources the page will show. Panels are auto-picked from the configured sources, so decide what should be live first — GPS-bearing feeds (dispatch, flights, firms, overpass) feed the map; webcam/browser feed the stills panel; anything scanned/monitored feeds the feed + wall:

overcast doctor --sources --json          # which source creds resolve
overcast case init --json
overcast source list --json               # what's registered/enabled for this case
overcast source add "dispatch:sf" --json  # (example) add a rolling real-time feed

2. Seed the monitors so fresh records land on the page. Either run a standing monitor loop yourself (its own pane), or let the serving process own the cadence with --every at serve time — pick ONE, not both:

overcast monitor --once --json            # sanity pass: confirm sources resolve
overcast monitor --every 5m --limit 5 --json   # standing loop (own pane) — OR use situation --every below

3. Operator step (not the agent): a human starts the page in its own pane. It BLOCKS on that process. --every makes the serving process own the monitor cadence too, so a separate loop isn't needed:

overcast situation                        # operator only — serves 127.0.0.1:7374, opens the browser
overcast situation --every 5m --panels wall,feed,map,stills   # operator: page owns the monitor cadence
# in the TUI instead: /situation on

4. Drive the running page. situation set retunes panels / interval / filters cross-process through the .overcast/situation/ control plane (consumed on the ~2s poll tick), status reports what's live, stop halts it:

overcast situation status --json                                    # panels + filters + liveness
overcast situation set --panels wall,map --source dispatch --since 12h --limit 16 --json
overcast situation set --clear source,since,limit --json            # drop filters back to auto
overcast situation stop --json                                      # stop via the control file

Panels

• wall — case videos muted + looping at their evidence moments (--limit caps tiles).
• feed — reverse-chron scan/monitor hits as they land.
• map — every GPS-bearing record; flights build tracks over successive polls.
• stills — webcam/browser sources re-captured each refresh.

Output

A running, token-authed page an operator watches, plus the situation status record documenting which panels/filters are live and the serve URL. State the cadence, which sources feed which panels, and that the operator (not the agent) opened the listener.

Caveats

Opening the listener is operator-only — the agent stays on status/set/stop (the /situation slash + agent tool expose only those). The page binds 127.0.0.1 by default; keep it off public interfaces. Local media streams over the token-authed /media Range route (a page served over http:// can't load file://); remote embeds are gated by OVERCAST_REPORT_REMOTE_MEDIA. Refresh is poll-based (store fingerprint → SSE), not eventing — a --poll tune trades freshness for load. The page is situational context, not evidence: situation is out of ask/brief.