diff --git a/src/workspaces/officerdev/src/apps/Chat/EmbeddableChat/useEmbeddableChat.ts b/src/workspaces/officerdev/src/apps/Chat/EmbeddableChat/useEmbeddableChat.ts
index 3e86d79a..504ff125 100644
--- a/src/workspaces/officerdev/src/apps/Chat/EmbeddableChat/useEmbeddableChat.ts
+++ b/src/workspaces/officerdev/src/apps/Chat/EmbeddableChat/useEmbeddableChat.ts
@@ -122,6 +122,28 @@ export function useEmbeddableChat(params: UseEmbeddableChatParams, onMessageComp
     if (textareaRef.current) textareaRef.current.style.height = 'auto';
   };
 
+  /**
+   * Page older messages in when the loaded ones do not fill the viewport.
+   *
+   * Scroll-up paging is driven by a scroll listener, and a scroll listener only fires on a list that
+   * actually scrolls. That was always true and never mattered, because the turn you were looking at
+   * rendered in full and was tall enough on its own. Folding on reload broke it: a window of twenty
+   * messages can be one turn with eighteen tool calls, which collapses to three short rows — no overflow,
+   * no scroll event, and paging simply never starts. The symptom is a transcript you cannot scroll back
+   * through at all, which reads as lost history rather than as a stalled fetch.
+   *
+   * Terminates: each pass either fills the viewport or exhausts the transcript, and `hasMoreOlder` goes
+   * false at the top. It runs after every prepend, so several small pages in a row are fine.
+   */
+  useEffect(() => {
+    const viewport = scrollViewportRef.current;
+    if (!viewport || !didInitialScrollRef.current) return;
+    if (!hasMoreOlder || isLoadingOlder) return;
+    // A pixel of slack: a list exactly as tall as its viewport cannot be scrolled either.
+    if (viewport.scrollHeight > viewport.clientHeight + 1) return;
+    void loadOlder();
+  }, [messages, hasMoreOlder, isLoadingOlder, loadOlder]);
+
   /**
    * Hand a batch to the agent as ONE message. Returns whether it actually started a turn — a slash
    * command the client handled itself (`/clear`, `/model`) never reaches the agent, so the drain below