---
id: known-bugs/refresh-mid-tool-call-renders-the-turn-folded
title: 'Refresh mid-turn folds the live tool call — it reads as finished while still running'
theme: known-bugs
status: open
created: 2026-08-25
date_source: stated
order: 5
---

**Refresh mid-turn folds the live tool call.** Reported 2026-08-25: refreshing while an agent is mid
tool-run collapses that turn's tool calls instead of leaving them expanded, so the chat reads as
finished when the agent is still working. Requested fix: the last, still-running turn must always
render EXPANDED across a refresh or a back-navigation, never folded.

**This is not unbuilt — there is already code for exactly this case, and it is being defeated
somewhere between the transcript load and the live-state confirmation.** `turn-rows.ts`'s `buildRows`
computes `generatingNow = isLast && isGenerating` and refuses to fold the last turn when it is true — a
comment there names this precise failure mode: _"for those few frames every unfinished turn looks
finished."_ So the intended behaviour is real; the bug is that the frames it warns about are not always
brief.

Where the race most likely lives, traced but not proven — `hooks/useChat.ts`:

- **`historicalCount` starts at `preloadedMessages?.length ?? 0`** (line ~110) — the whole HTTP-loaded
  transcript, tool call included, counted as history from the first render.
- **`isGenerating` starts `false`** and is only set true when the socket confirms it — via
  `sync:live` (rebinding to a turn that kept running) or `sync:messages` (a full resume).
- **`sync:live`'s own comment says messages are "deliberately absent — the transcript already loaded
  over HTTP"** — it sets `isGenerating` but does not touch `historicalCount`. `sync:messages`, by
  contrast, sets both together in one call (`setHistoricalCount(transcript.length)` immediately before
  `setIsGenerating(msg.isGenerating)`), which is the version that should self-correct.

So the two socket messages that confirm "still generating" do not treat `historicalCount` the same way,
and a refresh's actual sequence — HTTP transcript first, socket confirmation after — is exactly the
gap the `generatingNow` guard was written to close but may not fully reach depending on which message
arrives. Worth checking first: whether `sync:live` reliably fires before the user notices, and whether
server-side `session.isGenerating` (true from turn-start to turn-end in `claude-manager.ts`, tool calls
included) is actually what reaches the client in that message — or whether it's a timing gap rather
than a wrong value.

Possibly related, same neighbourhood (refresh + a live turn + folding), not confirmed as the same
cause: `known-bugs/refreshing-a-finished-chat-turn-loses-output` — a different symptom (a turn that DID
finish loses its output entirely and misreports `0 turns · 0 tok`) but the same refresh-time seam
between what the transcript says and what the live socket confirms.

**2026-08-25 — partly overtaken, and the measurement is worth having.** A separate cause was found and
fixed for the same family of symptom: `isGenerating` was never set by anything except `sendPrompt` and the
two handshakes, so a turn this tab did not start rendered as finished from the first event onwards. See
[[known-bugs/a-turn-this-tab-did-not-start-reads-as-finished]]. `session:claude` and `tool:start` now set
it, which means the last turn stops folding as soon as any work arrives — so the window this card is about
is now bounded by the next event rather than open-ended.

What is left here is the question this card actually asks, and it is now measured rather than suspected:
correlating every attach in the officer log against the agent's own subsequent durable output, **15 of 549
attaches that told a client "not generating" were contradicted, one of them provably** — the first event
after it was a `tool:result`, so a tool was already in flight when `sidecar.isClaudeGenerating` answered.
So `sync:live` does sometimes carry a wrong value, it is rare, and it is a wrong ANSWER rather than the
timing gap this card assumed. `historicalCount` was not implicated.