CLI Harness Design

The QControl CLI (qcontrol demo) needed designed terminal surfaces to set expectations, surface hidden magic, and make the co-brand (Cisco + Qpoint) visible at the moment engineers run their first AI agent through qcontrol. Jon owns the implementation; we own the text designs as handoff artifacts.

Produce legible, implementation-ready .txt design files for three surfaces — with ANSI color, clean copy, and a clear handoff format. Establish a pixel art toolchain for future terminal UI work.

• designs/v1–v8/ — iterative design artifacts across all three surfaces
• designs/pixel-to-ascii.py — PNG-to-block-art converter (PIL-based, grid auto-detection)
• designs/stitch.py — stitch icon .txt files side by side
• designs/preview.sh — render .txt files in terminal
• designs/v7/landing.txt — MOTD design (printf '%b' format)
• designs/v8/landing.txt — MOTD design (cat-compatible, actual ESC bytes, with ANSI color)
• impl-plan.md — Rust implementation guide for Jon

• Built half-height pixel art logo system: Qpoint Q (purple #7044DA) + Cisco (blue #00BCEB) lockup using ▄/▀/█ block chars
• Developed pixel-to-ascii.py with PIL-based grid detection, --double-wide, --crop, --color override
• Iterated through 8 versions of the MOTD landing screen — v8 is the handoff-ready version
• v8 uses actual ESC bytes + real newlines (cat-compatible), distinct from v1-v7's printf '%b' format
• Discovered full Unicode block character palette: vertical/horizontal fills, quadrants (▘▝▖▗▚▞▙▛▜▟), shades, and geometric bonus chars
• Identified quadrants as the highest-resolution option (2×2 sub-pixel per character cell)
• Documented format distinction: \033 literals (Rust embed) vs actual ESC bytes (cat preview)

Handoff-ready design package for Jon:

• designs/v8/landing.txt — the MOTD (cat to preview, copy into Rust)
• impl-plan.md — Rust embedding instructions (printf '%b\n', zsh hook placement, bash/fish parity)
• Pre-agent and status bar designs in designs/v4/

Spawned: qpixel — standalone ASCII block art editor built on the palette and toolchain discovered in this cycle. Web editor (click-to-paint grid, ANSI export) + CLI tools (pixel-to-ascii.py, stitch.py) in one repo.