A backgrounded command in a session's panel was a terminal glyph beside its
words. The glyph said "command" and so did the monospace face, which is the
same fact twice -- so the mark goes and the command is drawn the way every
other verbatim thing in this app is: highlighted, monospace, on the raw
surface. The glyph stays for the kinds whose description is prose, and for a
command a provider never named.
Tapping one landed the tool card against the bottom edge of the screen, since
a reversed list anchors an item by its bottom -- so a tall card arrived at its
last line. A card that fits the viewport is centred now, and one that does not
has its top put at the top, which is where reading it starts. Only for a
journey the reader asked for: a restore still puts them back exactly where
they stopped.
The panel's own close chevron is gone -- the drag, the scrim and Back all
close it -- and the count is drawn even when it is zero, so "nothing is
running" and "nobody has asked yet" stop looking identical. There is then
nothing to expand, so that heading carries no chevron either.
Checked on the emulator against the sandbox: the card centred in a
mid-transcript tap, sat at the newest end where the list clamps, and the
zero heading drew with no control.
A card in the session's panel said "background command" under every
description -- and for Codex, which names a terminal by a process id and
gives no description at all, that phrase was the whole of every card.
Both halves of the answer are in the transcript rather than in what the
provider says: a driver now reports which tool call its task belongs to
(Claude's `task_started` carries the `tool_use_id`, Codex's terminal list
the `itemId`), and `LiveSession::background_tasks` resolves those ids
against the transcript into a sequence number and, where the provider said
nothing, the command the call was made with. So the card draws the command,
and the kind shrinks to a mark beside it whose name is what a screen reader
is given.
Tapping one goes to that call in the transcript, opened, which is where a
backgrounded command's output already lands -- rather than drawing a second
copy of it beside the panel. The journey is the one a reopened session
already makes to put a reader back where they stopped, now one function
(`travelTo`). It has to release the held backlog first: events arriving
while the reader is away from the newest end are held rather than applied,
so a task started since they scrolled back was in no row at all and the tap
looked like it had done nothing.
Verified against the sandbox on the emulator: the panel draws
`sleep 120 && echo done` for an echo session's `/background`, and tapping
it lands on that Bash card with its output showing.
The count beside the status said how much work was going and never what,
so "3 bg tasks" was a number with no way to find out what it was about.
Drivers now report the tasks themselves rather than a size:
`Driver::background_tasks` returns `Vec<BackgroundTask>` -- id, the
provider's own description, and a kind -- served by
`GET /sessions/{id}/background`. It is runtime state, never persisted,
and `null` is "nobody has said", which is what a session with no process
answers and what the panel says in words rather than drawing as an empty
list. `description` is optional because Codex names a background terminal
by a process id, and a number drawn as a name is worse than admitting
there is none.
Claude's `background_tasks_changed` entries turn out to be objects
carrying `task_id`, `task_type` and `description`, so each is read rather
than counted -- and an `ambient` one is now dropped from the list and the
count alike, on the CLI's own instruction: a live-update watcher is not
activity, and counting one left a session reading `waiting` with nothing
to wait for.
The phone draws them in the right-hand panel above the subagents,
collapsed to "2 bg tasks running" and pushing the subagents down when
opened. Both lists are items of one lazy column, so neither can run off
the panel, and the section is refetched whenever the live count moves --
a card for work that has finished is exactly the stale measurement the
count exists not to be.
Verified against the real Claude CLI (2.1.261): a backgrounded `sleep 120`
came back as `{"id":"br16327wr","description":"Sleep for 120 seconds",
"kind":"command"}`, and on the emulator against the echo rig the section
appeared, expanded, and dropped a card as its task finished.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
iris-ai
