The /chat sidebar was two panels in a vertical 25/75 split — Live above, Sessions below — plus a directory
dropdown in the list header. Three problems that compounded: the Live panel was empty almost always, so a
quarter of the sidebar was permanently blank; the two panels had entirely disjoint indicators, so a
conversation with a turn running looked ordinary in the history; and the dropdown showed one directory at a
time, which turned "where was I working on that" into a search.
Now one panel, three tabs. Tree answers "what have I got, by project". Latest answers "what was I just
doing". Live answers "what is running". Same rows, same indicators, one place.
Tree is an accordion over /chat/pwds, each header carrying the full path from ~, the session count, and a
live count — plus New Chat here, since the tree only lists directories that already have history. A
COLLAPSED NODE ISSUES NO REQUEST: sessions are read by scanning transcripts off disk, and eager mounting
would be one scan per directory for rows nobody asked to see. `useClaudeSessions(cwd, {enabled})` is the
whole mechanism. The per-directory live count comes from the poll's own `cwd`, never from
`liveSessionTitle`, which reads a whole transcript and whose own comment warns against calling it from
anywhere hotter than a ten-second poll.
Latest needs a new server mode, `GET /chat/sessions?all=1` → `listAllClaudeSessions`. It loops directories
rather than scanning flat, because /clear chains are merged per group and a flat scan would let two
unrelated chains in different directories collapse into each other. Fetched only while the tab is showing.
Rows now carry the model, from the batched `getChatSessionModels` — one query per page, which is what that
query was added for.
THE MIGRATION IS THE DANGEROUS PART AND IT IS INVERTED. Every persisted layout still names `chat-live`, an
appType that no longer exists; `normalizeLayout` would collapse it onto the fallback and WRITE THAT BACK,
which is what made /offscale render three server pickers this morning (ed3806f9). The existing guard adopted
layouts LACKING the panel, so it had to flip to adopting layouts that HAVE it. defaultLayout.test.ts pins
both halves: the replacement must not contain the appType the guard tests for, or the effect fires on its
own output forever.
Deletes LiveSessions.tsx and PwdSelector.tsx — both replaced. Fixes the inherited bug in passing: the
"generating" Loader2 never had `animate-spin`, so the one indicator meaning "work is happening right now"
was a static icon.
View and expanded-node state go in localStorage, not the URL (a tab is a preference, and every session link
would carry it), not usePanelConfig (a NO-OP setter in a locked workspace, and /chat is locked), and not
useDashboardState (its PATCH only accepts layout-shaped objects). /chat/g/<path> still works and opens that
directory in the tree.
Untested against a running server: officer has not been restarted since these changes, and I am not
restarting it mid-conversation. `?all=1` and the model field are verified only by typecheck.
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>
pastilhas
