Things are moving quickly in the Middle East following the February 28 attack by Israel and the United States on Iran. Repeated waves of US-Israeli strikes have hit military and government sites across Iran, killing Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and prompting a temporary leadership council to take charge in Tehran. Iran has responded with threats to close the Strait of Hormuz and launched retaliatory attacks around the Gulf, raising fears that the conflict could spill over into a broader regional war and disrupt global energy supplies. One way the average Joe is trying to keep track is by “monitoring the situation” using dashboards—many of which, their creators admit, were spun up using vibe-coding tools like Claude Code.
The tools look like something out of a White House situation room—or at least a Hollywood depiction of one—and vary in what they track. They tend to pull together RSS news feeds, social media sentiment trackers, live news channel streams, and maps to try to identify areas of concern, along with stock market data and the latest trades on crypto and prediction markets. Some make a virtue of their wide-ranging oversight—World Monitor promises to monitor the world. Monitor the Situation also does exactly what it says it will, while also having an associated meme coin. Digital Embassy claims to be a “political and economic intelligence dashboard.”
The various dashboards have become a social media sensation, with some calling them the best way to keep on top of a fast-moving situation. Others are… less sure, dinging them AI vibe-coded slop that looks informative without actually being useful. “The dashboards are terrible and they do generally match what I have seen from industry,” says George Mason University professor Missy Cummings. “Steve Jobs would roll over in his grave to see these kludge-monsters.”
The problem, as she sees it, is that just because a dashboard may look like something lifted from the movies doesn’t mean it is actually practical for keeping up with fast-moving situations like what’s unfolding in the Middle East. “Somehow people think more information is better and this simply does not promote efficient decision making,” Cummings says.
Others see the merits of the dashboards, even if they are unlikely to be a like-for-like alternative to the official databases and tools used by those actually making decisions. There is the question of whether they are good enough, which, for Twitter, seems like, sure, I guess,” says Noah Sylvia, a research analyst in emerging tech at the Royal United Services Institute, a U.K.-based military think tank.
But for actual decision-making and monitoring of the situation, there is one massive gulf that Sylvia says separates professional products from hobbyist creations. And it is the same principle that applies to the AI products used to create many of the dashboards: Garbage in, garbage out.
More than the interface itself, the real difference lies in the data feeding these dashboards. Professionals simply have access to far deeper and more sophisticated datasets than hobbyist analysts on social media, while militaries and government agencies operate with even larger pools of information. “Militaries and government organizations can access far greater quantities of data, both open source intelligence and not,” Sylvia says.
However, for the average user simply trying to keep track of what is happening in Iran and the consequences spilling out from the initial attack, the inputs—and outputs—may well be good enough. And as many social media users have pointed out, whoever sets up a sports-bar equivalent of monitoring the situation looks set to make bank.