Surface Map
c1012026-09-28 · a brief for a designerEvery thing in Qpoint's dashboard has a page, and every page has a section called Surface that says what this thing reaches. Today that's nine lists. We think it wants to be a picture. Help us find out what that picture is.
The situation
Qpoint shows security and platform teams what AI coding tools are doing across their company. A person runs a tool like Claude Code or Cursor (we call it a harness) on their laptop (an endpoint). While it works, it calls AI models from providers, uses tools (some built in, some from plug-in MCP servers), carries skills, works in repos, opens files (some sensitive) and connects out to destinations on the internet. We record all of it over a time window.
Every harness, person, team, laptop, server, model and repo has a detail page. On each, the Surface section lists everything that thing reached: up to nine ranked lists. The lists are accurate, but they hide the shape of the answer. You can't see at a glance that this harness talks to five MCP servers, reaches three destinations nobody approved, and touched a shell-history file on the way.
Priya's Claude Code install over 40 sessions, from our demo data, exactly as the lists show it now. This is the scene we'd like you to draw your way.
Surface
what this harness reachesEverything this harness actually reaches across 40 sessions.
Models
2 in useMCP Servers
5 distinctTools
19 tools · 268 callsRepos & Workspaces
from working dirsEndpoints
1 hostUsers
1 personSensitive File Access
2 pathsNetwork Egress
6 destinations2 blocked actions · 4 sensitive-file opens · 0 findings in the same window.
Let someone opening any detail page see what that thing reaches, and what's wrong with it, before they read a single label, and then get to the detail they need.
What people come asking
Twenty questions, grouped by the job behind them. How you frame them, which you favour and which you leave for later is yours to decide.
What do we have?
- ●What does this reach, and what dominates?
- ●Where does this live?from a server or skill: every install, person and machine carrying it
- ●Who answers for it?account → harness → person → laptop; a personal account breaks the chain
- ◐Are these two things actually the same thing?
figmaconfigured,mcp.figma.comused
Is it in order?
- ●What are we actually watching, and what's blind?
- ●What's installed but never used?
- ●What's running now, what went quiet, and what never ran?
- ●Which copies are out of date or have drifted?
- ◐What arrived or left since I last looked?
What could go wrong?
- ◐What's in use that nobody set up?
- ●What's leaving the building, and was it allowed?
- ●Where does the risk sit?sensitive files, blocked actions, findings. If this were compromised, what could it reach?
- ○What could it do?read-only vs destructive tools
- ○Is this normal compared with its peers?
What should I do?
- ◐What's waiting on my decision?
- ○If I block this, who loses it?
Is it worth it?
- ●How heavily is each thing used, and what does it cost?
- ●Who's adopting what, and who isn't yet?
- ●Where are we paying twice for the same job?
Can someone else understand it?
- ●Can I show this to leadership or an auditor in one image?
Who asks: Security engineers, IT admins, SOC analysts, compliance and identity leads, engineering managers and FinOps. Some want reassurance, some want a to-do list, and some want a picture for a board deck.
The cast
The things a Surface can contain. Each needs to be recognizable on its own. Two already have a pawn; the rest are still marks in a list.
A page can centre on any of these, and the sizes vary a lot. One harness reaches about 37 things. A team is around 50. A whole company runs from a hundred to thousands.
The harness pawn already carries a small state system: a body plus decorations. It's a precedent, not a rule.
What's fixed
- It lives in the Surface section of a detail page. It sits beside the lists, not instead of them; the lists keep the exact numbers.
- The things are pixel pawns. They're character-like forms from our Pixel Pawns family, recognizable by silhouette. Only the harness and endpoint pawns exist yet; the rest are yours to add to the family.
- It renders in qmap, our isometric scene renderer. Custom models are welcome.
- Colour is functional. It means state or risk, never decoration.
- Everything with a page is a way in. A harness, server, model or repo opens its own detail page, just as its list row does. Files and destinations don't have pages yet.
- It must stay honest. Our data says this reaches that. It mostly doesn't say how the reached things connect to each other, and a thing we can't see is unknown, not empty.
- It works in light and dark, and from 1 thing to thousands.
What's open
Almost everything else is yours to decide:
- · how the problem is framed
- · which questions lead, and which become optional views
- · how things are arranged and grouped
- · how lines, weight, labels and marks work
- · whether the viewer moves the camera
- · what the empty state looks like
Some questions we've been asking ourselves, not to answer on our behalf, only as starting points:
- · Full pawns for every thing, or simpler forms for the minor ones?
- · Should nineteen tools be nineteen things, or collapse into their server?
- · Map first or list first, and does it depend on the page?
- · How far does the first round need to go toward the thousands case?
What we'd love to see first
- 1Your framing
Which questions this map is really for, for whom, and what you'd leave out.
- 2The cast
A first pass at the pawns and the states that matter.
- 3One real scene
Priya's harness, shown above as it is today, drawn your way.
After that, we'll pick the next steps together.