Desk Commander

DEMO ▶ Live demo — sample data, no setup needed

A personal "command center": not a passive dashboard, but a task engine. Tasks arrive from two sources — I add them myself, or domain AI agents propose them — and any task can be pushed to Google Calendar as a real event in one move.

Built as part of learning the rapid-prototyping loop (intent → prompt → live prototype → review → next iteration), the way advanced AI PMs do it — not "through chat".

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What the prototype does

• Task queue. Add tasks manually (the domain is inferred from keywords) or accept them from agents. Filter by domain, mark done.
• AI agents. Four domain agents — 🔍 Job search, 💪 Fitness & body, 🏠 Home, 📚 Projects & learning. Each looks at current tasks in its domain and proposes 3 next steps (a live model call).
• Push to calendar. Each task has a "📅 to calendar" button: pick a date/time and a real event is created in Google Calendar (colored by domain).
• Live schedule. The "Upcoming" block reads the next events from Google Calendar and groups them by day.
• Persistence. Manual tasks and filters are stored locally in the browser.

How it works

The prototype is a self-contained HTML page (app/index.html) with a backend-agnostic adapter: the same buttons work through one of two backends.

1. Production mode (n8n). In a browser, the desk sends POST {action, ...} to a single n8n workflow webhook. The workflow (workflows/desk.workflow.json) branches on action:
   • listEvents / createEvent → Google Calendar (read & create events, OAuth on the n8n side);
   • agent → Claude (Haiku) generates 3 tasks. The webhook URL lives in app/config.js (gitignored — copy it from app/config.example.js). The Claude API key and Google OAuth never leave n8n.
2. Cowork mode. Opened as a Cowork artifact (with BACKEND empty), calls go through the Cowork runtime: window.cowork.callMcpTool(...) (calendar) and window.cowork.askClaude(...) (agents).

The Cowork sandbox blocks outbound network requests, so the n8n version must be opened as a normal web page in a browser, not inside the Cowork panel. That's exactly the "live prototype → real app" transition.

Structure

.
├── README.md              — this file
├── CHANGELOG.md           — version history
├── DEVLOG.md              — prototyping diary (how we thought)
├── app/
│   └── index.html         — the working prototype (frontend)
├── workflows/
│   └── desk.workflow.json — backend: n8n workflow (importable, no secrets)
└── docs/
    ├── spec-admin-panel-v1.md   — practice intent artifact (role-based admin)
    ├── spec-command-desk.md     — intent artifact + prompt for the current concept
    ├── n8n-setup.md             — building the production backend (what we actually built)
    ├── make-setup.md            — alternative we considered: Make.com
    └── sim-setup.md             — alternative we considered: Sim

Roadmap

• n8n backend: schedule, event creation, agents — on real data.
• Host the desk on a public domain (currently opened as a local file in a browser).
• Scheduled agents (a morning auto-run) instead of a manual button.
• Task ↔ created-event link (edit / cancel from the desk).
• Share the desk with a partner (roles — from the admin-panel practice example).

Run locally

cp app/config.example.js app/config.js   # then put your n8n webhook URL in config.js
open app/index.html                       # open in a normal browser

config.js is gitignored, so your webhook URL stays out of the repo. With no config.js, the desk falls back to the Cowork runtime.

Stack

Frontend — plain HTML/CSS/JS, no build step. Backend — an n8n workflow (cloud): Google Calendar (OAuth) + Claude (Haiku) for agents. Inside Cowork the same frontend runs through the Cowork runtime.

Secrets stay out of the repo: the n8n webhook URL lives in the gitignored app/config.js; the Claude API key and Google OAuth are stored as credentials inside n8n and are never in these files (including the workflow export).