@sola-air-ui/sentinel

Notice when someone hesitates on a form, and describe what you saw.

No dependencies. No build step. Works in React, Svelte, or plain DOM, and does not require the Sola runtime or rewriting any of your components.

npm install @sola-air-ui/sentinel

What it does

It watches focus, typing and blur across a form; decides when a pause is actually meaningful rather than a keystroke gap; and builds a natural-language prompt describing the activity. What you do with that prompt is yours — call a model, look up a similar record, show a hint.

The gate is the interesting part. Naive versions fire on every change; this one requires a real quiet period after real activity, rate-limits itself, and needs more than one event before it will say anything.

React

import { useSentinel } from '@sola-air-ui/sentinel/react';

function IncidentForm() {
  const { ref, prompt } = useSentinel({ onSuggest: (p) => ask(p) });

  return (
    <form ref={ref}>
      <label htmlFor="d">Short description</label>
      <input id="d" name="short_description" />
      <label htmlFor="c">Caller</label>
      <input id="c" name="caller" />
    </form>
  );
}

Nothing inside the form changes — no wrapper components, no per-field handlers.

Svelte

<script>
  import { sentinel } from '@sola-air-ui/sentinel/svelte';
  let prompt = null;
</script>

<form use:sentinel={{ onSuggest: (p) => (prompt = p) }}>
  <!-- unchanged -->
</form>

Plain DOM

import { observe } from '@sola-air-ui/sentinel';

const { disconnect } = observe(document.querySelector('#incident-form'), {
  onSuggest: (prompt) => console.log(prompt)
});

Useful where a framework cannot go — a ServiceNow Service Portal widget, a browser extension, an embedded surface in a page you do not control.

Privacy

It observes what people type, so the defaults are conservative:

• password, hidden and file inputs are never read, and their events are not recorded at all.
• Fields whose autocomplete marks them as a one-time code, a current or new password, or a card field are excluded the same way.
• Anything carrying data-sentinel-ignore, or inside an element that does, is excluded.
• redact(fieldName, value, el) rewrites a value before it is recorded. Return '' to keep only its length.

Values stay in memory, in a bounded buffer (50 events, 60 seconds). Nothing is sent anywhere — the package makes no network calls.

Tuning the gate

| Option | Default | What it controls | |---|---|---| | idleThresholdMs | 1500 | Quiet period after activity before firing | | minSuggestIntervalMs | 8000 | Minimum gap between suggestions | | minEventsForSuggestion | 2 | Events required before saying anything | | pollMs | 250 | How often the gate is checked |

Also exported

createSentinel() gives you the observer directly if you would rather record events yourself — it also tracks rage-clicks and a flowIndex derived from friction severity, backtracking, and pacing variance.

MIT.