Generative UI over MCP

The core principle: the agent supplies structured content through MCP; Ringtail owns every pixel.

• The MCP schema is a UI-component vocabulary — Wizard, Step, Action, Status. The agent fills typed slots; it never emits HTML, markdown, or CSS.
• Each type maps 1:1 to a component in the libs/ui "Night Shift" design system, so agent output is on-brand by construction.
• Schema-validated data is safe (no injection) and beautiful (no ugly freeform output). The constrained vocabulary is the moat for both quality and security.

Agent = director (what); Ringtail = stage and actors (pixels). This is why the design system was built first: it's the render target.

The unified contract

"Set up an unknown key" and "do this next action" are the same structured thing, rendered by one universal 1-2-3 wizard. A Step has one of four kinds:

• open-url — Ringtail opens an allowlist-validated https provider deep-link.
• paste — the value flows user → Ringtail, never through the agent. The agent authors the step ("paste your Resend key, needs sending scope"); Ringtail collects, validates, and stores. This is what keeps the guarantee true even for agent-generated wizards.
• auto — a typed executor / API call, no human.
• confirm — human approval; destructive steps are hard-gated, never one-click.

The full TypeScript shapes are in the contract reference.

The dashboard is a conversation

The cockpit has a chat panel — you talk to the same agent that's driving everything. It converses (chat) and renders (grid, wizards, actions) over the same MCP connection: chat is the direction channel, the components are the state channel, one agent behind both. Steer the action list in plain language — "also set up Stripe", "skip the R2 bucket", "add a staging env" — and the agent re-maps and re-renders. Chat is about intent and actions, never secret values; paste-bypasses-the-agent still holds.