Iris

Vedran BurojevićThread Content
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Turns agent replies into live cards you can use: charts, test runs, decisions, plans and small apps, drawn in your bb theme. Agents pick from 120 components on their own and check each card before you see it, so a status report arrives as metrics and progress, and proof of done as criteria with their evidence. Sliders and toggles recompute cards in place, buttons and pickers send your answer back to the agent, and live cards re-read files every 2 seconds while a job runs. Cards also read bb itself: the thread's context use, the threads it started, its pull request, commits and plan usage. Adds about 15k tokens of instructions to each top-level session, and maps and photos call OpenStreetMap, Photon and Wikimedia Commons unless you turn web lookups off.

Overview

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What you get

Agents answer with cards instead of long text. A status report comes back as metrics and a progress bar, proof that work is done as a checklist of criteria with their evidence, a comparison as a decision whose weights you can drag, and a test run as its failures with links to the lines. The answer stays in a sentence or two above the card.

There are 120 components in 30 families: layout, charts, data grids, diagrams, code and diffs, test, coverage and lint reports, plans, boards, roadmaps, maps, media players, 3D scenes, math, spreadsheets, API inspectors, whiteboards and more. Every card takes its colors from your bb theme and follows it when you switch.

How it works

The agent writes a short iris code block in its reply, and bb draws it as a card while the reply streams in. Before sending, the agent checks the block with the iris_check tool, which reads the files it loads, moves every input to its extremes and returns an outline of what you will see.

  • Sliders, toggles and pickers recompute the card in place.
  • Buttons put text in your message, and iris_ask opens a picker that waits for your answer, like ask mode.
  • A live card re-reads its files every 2 seconds, so a running job's log, progress or test results fill in as they land.
  • load("bb:...") reads bb's own data for the card's thread: its context use, the threads it started, its pull request, commits and changes, plan usage, machines and plugins.
  • Other plugins can publish JSON that cards read with load("plugin:<id>/<name>").
  • iris-react and iris-app blocks run small React or HTML apps in a sandbox with no network.

The gallery in bb's sidebar shows every component live, with its code and every prop. The same gallery and a live editor run in the browser at https://vburojevic.github.io/bb-plugin-iris/.

Safety

Expressions run in a sandboxed interpreter with no eval and a step budget. Cards make no network requests of their own: a web image or media file loads only when its full URL is written in the block, and map places and photo searches go through Iris's server only while web lookups are on. Files load only from the thread's workspace and bb's thread storage folders.

Costs and settings

Iris adds about 15k tokens of instructions to each session it reaches. By default that is every top-level thread; threads that agents spawn under them are left out unless you turn on the workers setting. Maps, place search and photos call OpenStreetMap, Photon and Wikimedia Commons through Iris's server; turn webLookups off to keep cards offline. Some components use experimental bb plugin APIs, so a bb update can change how they look until Iris catches up.

Source, docs and the eval suite: https://github.com/vburojevic/bb-plugin-iris

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