Problem
A high-frequency orchestration UI cannot re-render for every event without turning observability into the bottleneck it was meant to diagnose.
What I built
I built a simulated agentic engineering squad with worker roles, task graph orchestration, event streaming, RSS telemetry, and a command center that buffers and flushes updates intentionally.
Architecture / system design
The system separates worker/queue orchestration from UI state. WebSocket events land in a non-reactive buffer and flush to React state every 100 ms, so the browser paints at a human-readable cadence.
Failure modes / what broke
The browser became the bottleneck before the backend did. The fix was treating UI updates as a backpressure problem instead of pretending React should process every event as app state.
Proof / metrics / tests
The current page documents 750+ synthetic events/sec and a max UI event rate bounded by the browser paint cadence.
Lessons learned
Observability surfaces are systems too. If they have no backpressure model, they can fail exactly when the underlying system gets interesting.