Generative UI

ComicBitThread Content
Get it for macOS

Turns agent replies into charts, diagrams, maps, plans and forms you can use, right in the chat. Agents choose from 86 components on their own, with no setup: sliders and filters recompute in the page, and buttons and forms send your pick back as your next message. Test reports, logs, lint errors and coverage files render as their own components instead of pasted text, and a thread's changes, commits, pull request and workers are read live from BB. Adds about 4,000 tokens of instructions to sessions whose replies you read, and looks up photos, places and map tiles on Wikimedia Commons, Photon and OpenStreetMap unless you turn web lookups off. Relies on BB internals, so a BB update can show the blocks as code until the plugin catches up.

Overview

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What you get

  • Charts, tables, diagrams, maps, timelines, kanban boards and roadmaps built from what the agent found, in BB's colours and in light or dark mode.
  • Inputs that work in place: drag a slider, tick a box or edit a table and the result recomputes in the page, with no extra model call.
  • Answers that go back: buttons, choices and forms send your pick to the agent as your next message.
  • Tool output as components: test reports, logs, stack traces, lint and type errors, coverage, dependency audits, CI runs and benchmarks, read from the files the agent saved instead of pasted into the reply.
  • Your project, read live from BB: the thread's changes, commits, pull request, worker threads and worktrees.
  • Evidence you can check: acceptance grids that say what was verified and by whom, image comparisons with a pixel difference, and transcripts aligned word by word.
  • Small sandboxed apps for what the components can't express, such as a game or a simulation, with no network access.

How it works

Once the plugin is on, agents in the threads you read learn the components and pick them on their own. A reply carries a short ui block that BB draws while the reply streams. The Gen-UI Gallery page in the sidebar shows all 86 components with more than 170 examples. bb genui render prints any reply with its UI as plain markdown.

Requirements and costs

  • BB 0.45 or later.
  • About 4,000 tokens of instructions in each session whose replies you read. Worker threads that agents spawn get none.
  • Web lookups, on by default and switchable in the plugin's settings: photo search on Wikimedia Commons, place names through Photon and map tiles from OpenStreetMap. These services see your IP address and what is looked up.
  • Components read files only from the thread's workspace, its thread storage and /tmp.
  • BB has no plugin slot for code blocks yet, so the plugin draws over BB's own. A BB update can show the blocks as code until the plugin catches up.

Source and documentation: https://github.com/ComicBit/bb-plugin-genui

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