The previous commit added it to defaultLayout, which anyone who has ever opened /chat never sees:
useDashboardState seeds its default only when the key is ABSENT, so a stored layout keeps the shape it
had when it was first written. appTypes/normalizeLayout does not cover this — it repairs which app a
panel runs, never the tree — so the change was visible only on a fresh account. It was shipped with a
note to reset the layout by hand, which is not a fix.
The screen now replaces a layout with no chat-live panel. Replacing outright is safe here specifically
because the screen is locked: the structure is dictated by code, and the only user contribution is
column sizes. Terminates because the replacement contains the panel it tests for.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The /chat sidebar is now a vertical split: live sessions on top, the transcript list below. They look
similar and answer completely different questions — the list reads conversations from disk, thousands of
them, while this reads the agent's in-memory map over `claude:list`. Only the second can tell you a
conversation is still working while nothing is on screen, which is exactly the state that has been
invisible: after a `pm2 restart officer`, or from a browser that has never seen the session, officer has
no record of a live turn and only the agent can say.
`pendingTasks` is surfaced per row because it is the load-bearing number. It is what keeps a session
alive with nothing on screen, and what makes restarting the agent sidecar unsafe at that moment.
Polled at 10s rather than pushed: liveness changes without officer being told — a turn ends, a
background task reports — so there is no single event to subscribe to. The request is one map read.
Titles come from the sessions query already in cache, so they cost nothing, but that query only covers
the group being browsed and a live session can be in any of them. Unmatched rows show a short key rather
than inventing a name, and an unsaved chat renders unlinked rather than pointing at a transcript that
does not exist yet.
Closes the UI half of step 2 in docs/chat-session-lifetime.md.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
pastilhasandClaude Opus 5