command-box

Alt+I opens a lower-middle command surface for out-of-band prompts, board verbs, mentions, presets, and file paths.

The dashboard's authored control channel is a Command Box, not a second terminal input. The name states why it exists: this is where a human addresses SpexCode's board and appends an out-of-band prompt, while the agent's own TUI remains the default place to converse and drive interactive menus (terminal-input).

The reserved single-modifier chord Alt+I toggles it for a live session; Command/Ctrl+I remain native or browser-owned shortcuts. The toolbar exposes the same action as an icon-only button named by its tooltip and accessible label. Opening focuses the Command Box. Escape or an outside click closes it without discarding the draft, and focus returns to the TUI. Drafts are keyed by session and survive closing, routing away, and switching sessions. Vim behavior is deliberately outside the current contract.

The box floats in the terminal's lower middle, horizontally centered. Its bottom edge is fixed at about 78% of the terminal pane's height: low enough to feel near the working prompt, with enough room below to keep the surrounding TUI visible. It does not reserve layout or resize xterm. Its width is bounded for scanning and shrinks with the pane. The shared composer footer stays on that fixed bottom edge while textarea content grows upward to a bounded cap; the box never walks toward the screen bottom or top as lines are added. Menus open above the caret/footer inside the available upper space. At phone width the desktop Command Box does not replace mobile-ui's existing composer.

Sending appends the prompt to the selected session's durable log (dispatch), so one authored prompt lands atomically even while the terminal is in copy mode. @session is kept in that prompt as a passive mentions reference; it never sends to the referenced session or creates a worker. The box owns one right-pane action-outcome surface: it exposes sending while the request is pending, retains the complete draft and returned HTTP/body error for a refused delivery, and therefore stays ready for retry. It carries no delivery marker of its own: a send either put the bytes in the log or did not, so a retry is only ever a retry of something that never landed. On a 2xx it visibly acknowledges delivery in that same surface before clearing the draft and closing; disappearing is never the only success signal. A close, session switch, or the next send owns clearing that outcome; the session list never mirrors it. Enter sends only when it is not committing an IME composition; Shift+Enter adds a line. The box uses the one shared composer shell also used by Issues and Evals.

Its grammar is the old control plane, kept in one place: **node** resolves at send to the node id plus its live spec.md pointer; @session uses mentions as a passive reference; / lists available board commands first, then command presets, then harness commands. Board rows execute locally from the same registry as toolbar twins; authoring rows insert text. /stop, /close, /merge, and /eval retain their existing meaning. There is no /type: direct TUI input is already the default. File paste, drop, and pick reuse file-attach, uploading bytes to the worker machine and inserting the returned local path at the caret.