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Overview

WGPUI is the GPU-accelerated UI rendering library used across OpenAgents. It provides a cross-platform rendering stack built on wgpu, a component system, a layout engine, and testing utilities for high-performance UI surfaces (chat threads, tool call cards, streaming markdown, etc). WGPUI is inspired by GPUI (the GPU-accelerated UI framework built for the Zed editor) and borrows the same entity-driven, render-tree approach to building immediate-mode views on top of a retained state model. Effuse (the former TS UI stack) is deprecated. WGPUI is the new canonical UI layer for Autopilot Desktop.

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Where it lives in the repo

  • crates/wgpui/ - core GPU UI library (renderer, layout, components, testing)
  • crates/autopilot_ui/ - shared WGPUI surfaces for Autopilot
  • crates/autopilot_app/ - app core consumed by both CLI and desktop
  • apps/autopilot-desktop/ - native desktop shell using WGPUI + winit
  • Examples and demos:
    • crates/wgpui/examples/storybook/
    • crates/wgpui/examples/component_showcase.rs
    • crates/wgpui/examples/first_light.rs

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Core architecture

WGPUI is organized around an entity-driven UI model and an element tree pipeline:
  • App + Entity system: typed state containers and reactive notifications (crates/wgpui/src/app/*).
  • Element tree: layout, prepaint, and paint phases for UI elements (crates/wgpui/src/element/*).
  • Scene: accumulated draw commands (quads, text runs, images, lines).
  • Renderer: wgpu pipelines, GPU buffers, and shaders (crates/wgpui/src/renderer.rs and crates/wgpui/src/shaders/*).
  • Layout: Taffy-based flexbox layout engine (crates/wgpui/src/layout.rs).
  • Text: cosmic-text shaping and glyph atlas (crates/wgpui/src/text.rs, crates/wgpui/src/text_system/*).
  • Input + actions: platform-agnostic events and a keymap/action system (crates/wgpui/src/input.rs, crates/wgpui/src/action/*, crates/wgpui/src/keymap/*).
For a full reference, see crates/wgpui/docs/README.md and crates/wgpui/docs/phase1-foundation.md in the OpenAgents repo.

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Component system

WGPUI ships a rich UI kit organized by level:
  • Atoms: badges, indicators, icons, status pills, etc.
  • Molecules: cards, rows, headers, input clusters.
  • Organisms: complex UI blocks like tool call cards and message rows.
  • Sections: higher-order panes like thread views and editors.
  • HUD: overlays, command palette, status bars, modals.
Core components include Div, Text, Button, TextInput, ScrollView, VirtualList, Modal, Dropdown, and Tabs (crates/wgpui/src/components/*).

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Platform support

  • Desktop: winit + native wgpu swapchain.
  • Web: wasm-bindgen + WebGPU.
The platform abstraction is in crates/wgpui/src/platform.rs.

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Testing

WGPUI includes a dedicated test harness and snapshot tooling in crates/wgpui/src/testing/. This is the foundation for UI regression tests and layout inspection in the WGPUI migration plan.

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Autopilot Desktop (WGPU)

The native WGPU desktop app lives in:
  • apps/autopilot-desktop/src/main.rs
That entrypoint wires:
  • autopilot_app (core app state and event flow)
  • autopilot_ui::MinimalRoot (WGPUI view root)
  • WGPUI renderer + text system
  • winit event loop and window lifecycle
This is the canonical path for the desktop UI going forward.

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Migration status

See apps/autopilot-desktop/docs/migration/EFFUSE_TO_WGPUI_PLAN.md in the OpenAgents repo for the full migration plan and architectural decisions.