Zenbox

A 3D zen-garden web view of your unread Slack messages, where each unread message is a potted plant that wilts with age.

Zenbox turns the anxiety of a cluttered Slack into something calm you actually want to look at. Instead of a wall of red unread badges, it gives you a single web page — the Unread Garden — that renders your unread Slack messages from the last three days as a 3D zen garden: raked sand with a scattering of potted plants, one plant per unread message.

Didn't work? Create a Minds workspace and paste this to your agent: /use-inspiration https://github.com/pseay-imbue/zenbox

What it is

Fresh messages are healthy and green; as a message goes unanswered it wilts — yellowing after a few hours, drooping and brown after a day — so a single glance tells you both how much is waiting and how stale it has become. Hover a plant to read the channel, sender, and message text; click it to open that exact message in Slack and act on it. The page refreshes itself about once a minute, and when you have no unreads in the window it simply says "Your garden is at peace."

It is a single-user, read-only ambient view — it never posts, marks things read, or changes anything in your Slack. It only reflects what is already there.

How it works

system/apps/slack_zen_garden is the whole application — a self-contained Flask service with no database.

• src/slack_zen_garden/runner.py — a small Flask app with three routes: / serves the front-end, /api/plants returns the live unread data as JSON, and /health is a liveness probe. It reaches Slack exclusively by shelling out to latchkey curl (the slack() helper), calling client.counts, conversations.history, conversations.info, users.info, and auth.test. It filters to messages newer than your last-read marker within a 72-hour window, resolves Slack markup to readable text, buckets each message by age, and builds a Slack permalink for each one.
• src/slack_zen_garden/assets/index.html — a single self-contained page that loads three.js, renders the plants as a 3D garden, polls api/plants every ~60 seconds, and wires up hover tooltips and click-to-open-in-Slack.

It runs as a workspace service (the [program:slack-zen-garden] block in system/supervisord.conf), serving at /service/slack-zen-garden/ through the workspace proxy on port 8083 (overridable via SLACK_ZEN_GARDEN_PORT). All Slack access flows through latchkey curl, so there are no API keys or token files in the repo.

Adapting this

This repository is a Minds inspiration — a bootable snapshot you can create a new mind from, not just read. Once adopted, an agent follows inspiration-zenbox.md to present and adapt it.

• Connect your Slack. Zenbox needs read access to your unread messages — the adopting agent requests the slack-read-all permission during setup, which covers every Slack method it calls. Nothing is stored; credentials are injected at call time by latchkey.
• Tune the window, buckets, and caps. The 72-hour window, the green/yellow/ brown age thresholds, and the plant caps (60 total, 15 per conversation) are module constants in runner.py — adjust them to how busy your Slack is.
• Thread replies are not shown — only top-level channel, DM, and group-DM messages. Extend fetch_unread() to walk conversations.replies if you live in threads.
• Single-user, no auth, and the port (8083) is set in runner.py and the supervisord wiring — add authentication and change the port if you expose it beyond a private workspace.