HADES Terminal

Every trading dashboard makes the same silent promise: the numbers on the glass are real. In July 2026 I learned what that promise is worth when nothing enforces it — an agent painted fabricated telemetry into my own cockpit, and the screens looked exactly as healthy as they would have looked if the system were working. The full account is in the Burned Door post-mortem. The HADES Terminal is what I built in the aftermath: the anti-cockpit. It inverts the default. A conventional dashboard renders whatever it is fed; this one refuses to render anything it cannot prove.

The terminal exists and runs on my own desk — roughly ninety panels, built on Solid.js — and its architecture is a single rule applied without exception: every displayed number carries its provenance or the panel does not display it.

What it does

No instrument’s engine comes with the terminal, which is the shell the instruments render into.

• Provenance on the glass. Every figure on every panel is stamped with the git SHA of the code that produced it and the sha256 of the source artifact it was computed from. The provenance is not a tooltip courtesy — it is the render condition. A number without a traceable artifact is not a number the terminal shows.
• LOCKED as a first-class state. When a panel cannot verify its data — the artifact is missing, the hash does not match, the pipeline upstream went quiet — it enters a visible LOCKED state instead of showing a stale or unverifiable value. An honest blank outranks a confident lie, and the terminal enforces that ranking structurally.
• Coverage across the desk surface. The panel set spans the cockpit’s working surface — on the order of ninety panels — each governed by the same render-or-lock discipline. There is no privileged panel that gets to skip verification because it is “just a status light”. Status lights were exactly what was faked.
• Published panel inventories and verification statistics. Which panels, verifying against which artifacts, at what refresh discipline: NOT YET PUBLISHED. The inventory ships with the artifacts that prove it, not before.

What it does not do

The terminal has no fake-number detector, and could not have one: by the time a figure reaches a panel, a number someone invented and a number that merely lost its paper trail look identical.

What it has instead is a render condition — a figure arrives carrying the SHA of the code that produced it and the hash of the artifact it was computed from, or the panel goes LOCKED. A figure with nothing behind it fails that condition whether it was invented or merely orphaned, so the terminal never has to work out which one it is looking at. What the condition cannot do is vouch for a number that arrives with its provenance intact: it proves where a figure came from, not that the figure is right.

It does not estimate, interpolate, or gracefully degrade into plausible values. When the data is unprovable the terminal shows you that fact, prominently, instead of a number. Teams accustomed to dashboards that always show something will find this uncomfortable at first. That discomfort is the product working: every LOCKED panel is a fabrication that did not happen.

What a seat includes — and what it does not

The Terminal is the shell, not the engine room. It is the provenance seat: the rendering surface, the hash-per-number discipline, the refusal machinery, and the core panels. The instruments are peers that plug into it, licensed separately — the camera body and the lenses, where a body costing less than a lens is the normal shape rather than a paradox.

A seat includes: the rendering surface and refusal engine · provenance stamping on every figure · the LOCKED state machinery · the core panel set · the artifact-verification layer.

A seat does not include: any instrument’s engine. Feed Auditor, Overfit Auditor, Positioning, Regime Feed and the rest are licensed à la carte and plug in. A seat with no engines renders the shell and nothing to put in it.

Licence shape: annual only. The support cost of this product concentrates in the first days of commissioning, so a monthly licence would subsidise evaluation rather than filter it. Quarterly billing is available on the annual term, with a stated refund window. There is no free trial: a short paid pilot, credited in full on conversion, means commissioning is billable and intent is proven before hours are spent. The two routes that would do the looking-before-buying at no support cost — a read-only demonstration environment on synthetic data and the published receipts corpus — are NOT YET PUBLISHED. Until they are, the paid pilot is the only way in, which is a worse position for a prospective buyer than the one I intend and better stated than implied away.

Final figures and the full includes/excludes table publish with pricing at launch: NOT YET PUBLISHED.

Who it is for

Desks that have been burned by a dashboard — or that cannot afford to find out whether they would be. Teams whose telemetry passes through enough hands (vendors, pipelines, agents) that “where did this number come from?” no longer has a one-hop answer. Anyone who has ever stared at a green screen and wondered whether green meant healthy or merely rendered.