Dashboard View

The Dashboard is the landing page for each repository. It provides a GitHub-style overview of repository health, activity, and key metrics at a glance — designed to answer "what's happening in this repo?" within seconds of opening it.

Accessing the Dashboard

• Click the LayoutDashboard icon in the activity bar (first item)
• The Dashboard is shown by default when opening a repository

Layout

The Dashboard uses a responsive card-based layout that adapts to window width. It contains:

• Key Stats Row — five metric cards across the top (Files, Size, Pointers, Hydration, This Week)
• Commit Activity Heatmap — GitHub-style 52-week contribution grid
• Top Contributors — ranked list by commit count
• Commit Frequency Chart — bar chart with day/week/month granularity
• Branch Health — ahead/behind status for active branches
• Dedup Savings — storage efficiency metrics
• Release Timeline — recent tags with relative timestamps
• Recent Commits — last 20 commits with SHA, message, author, and time

Metric Cards

Key Stats Row

Five stat cards across the top provide instant orientation:

Commit Activity Heatmap

A GitHub-style contribution heatmap showing the last 52 weeks of commit activity. Each cell represents one day, colored by commit count (darker = more commits).

Hovering a cell shows: date, commit count, and top author for that day.

Commit Frequency Chart

A bar chart showing commit frequency over time with selectable granularity:

• Day — daily commit counts
• Week — weekly aggregates (default)
• Month — monthly aggregates

Top Contributors

Ranked list of contributors by commit count. Shows name and total commits. Clicking a contributor filters the Timeline view to their commits.

Branch Health

Shows the status of active branches:

• How far ahead/behind each branch is relative to main
• Stale branches (no commits in 30+ days) highlighted
• Click a branch to navigate to the Branches view

Dedup Savings

Crab-specific metric showing storage efficiency:

• Total logical size vs actual stored size
• Deduplication ratio as a percentage
• Visual progress bar

Release Timeline

Shows recent tags/releases with:

• Tag name and date
• Time since release
• Click to view the tag in the Timeline

Recent Commits

The last 20 commits with:

• Short SHA (clickable → Timeline)
• Commit message subject
• Author name
• Relative timestamp

Data Loading

The Dashboard fetches multiple metrics in parallel on mount:

// All fetches fire simultaneously
Promise.all([
  rpc.repoSummary(repoId),
  rpc.gitLog(repoId, { max: 20 }),
  rpc.gitActivity(repoId),
  rpc.gitContributors(repoId),
  rpc.listRefs(repoId),
  rpc.gitPulse(repoId, { days: 7 }),
  rpc.gitCommitFrequency(repoId, { granularity: "week" }),
  rpc.dedupSavings(repoId),
  rpc.gitBranchHealth(repoId),
  rpc.gitReleaseTimeline(repoId),
]);

Each metric renders independently as it arrives — the Dashboard never shows a single loading spinner for all data.

Stale-While-Revalidate

Expensive metrics (code frequency, contributor growth) use cached values on subsequent visits, refreshing in the background without showing loading states.

Deferred Repositories

If a repository is marked as deferred (restored from localStorage but not yet opened via the agent), the Dashboard shows a gentle "Opening repository…" state instead of attempting RPC calls that would fail.

Navigation

Clicking elements in the Dashboard navigates to detailed views:

• Commit SHA → Timeline view (commit selected)
• Branch name → Branches view (branch selected)
• Contributor → Timeline view (filtered by author)
• Hydration percentage → Large Files view