Three things, all of them the same complaint: scrolling back through a long
session stalls.
**The fold was on the main thread.** Only `fetchTranscript` was inside
`withContext(Dispatchers.IO)`; the fold loop that turns a page into rows ran
on the caller's dispatcher, which is Main. `foldEvent` returns a new list
per event, so a page is that many copies of a list growing to that length --
about three hundred thousand element copies -- run in the middle of the
scroll that asked for it. Affordable at 80 events per page and not at 800.
**`warm` scanned the whole transcript on the calling thread.** Only
`replies.warm` was off it; the `markdownIn` split that decides *what* to
parse ran before the hop, over every assistant message loaded, on every
page. The scan grew with the conversation while the work it found stayed one
page's worth.
**The cushion was eight rows, which is not a distance.** A row is anything
from one line to a page: on a tool-heavy transcript eight rows is less than
one screen, so the reader reached the end of what was loaded on every swipe
and waited a round trip standing there. It is three screenfuls now, measured
from what is actually on screen. On the emulator against a 24,000-event
transcript that is 3 page fetches for 10 swipes rather than 10.
Also a spinner while a chat loads. Nothing is drawn while the newest page is
in flight or a saved position is being put back, and a blank page is what
this screen otherwise means by "there is nothing here" -- so the state that
does not know needed its own appearance.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
A command, a tool's output and a code block in a reply are the one thing on
this screen that is not somebody's prose, and they now say so: Mocha's
Crust, which sits below Base, so the same colour is one clear step down both
on the page where a reply is drawn and on the card where a tool call is.
The renderer's code background was `surfaceVariant`, which is exactly a
card's own fill -- a fenced block inside a tool call had no background at
all, and one in a reply read as a step *up* out of the page.
Tool output takes the monospace face with it. It is column-aligned far more
often than it is prose -- a listing, a diff, a table of numbers -- and a
proportional font silently destroys the alignment that carried the meaning.
`RawBlock` is a composable rather than a modifier because the inset is part
of it: monospace text against the edge of a tinted block reads as clipping.
A call with neither a subject nor any other field draws nothing at all
rather than an empty tinted rectangle.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
ai-app-2 found the reason a session Iris had scrolled in took a while to
open, and it is a defect in what I shipped this morning. A `ScrollAnchor`
stored the list's own row key. That key looks stable and is not: a tool
row is named after its run, `joinPages` gives a run the name its *newest*
half carries, and the newest half is whatever the newest page happened to
start with. The newest page is the last eighty events, so the name is
fixed for an idle session -- which is why this passed on the emulator --
and changes the moment the session says anything. An active session
therefore renamed its tool runs on every reopen, the anchor was never
found, and the restore paged backwards until there was no history left,
i.e. to the first event of the conversation.
So the anchor is a sequence number now, taken from the oldest event
behind the row. That is the server's own numbering: assigned once, never
moved, the same on every device. The restore finds the last row starting
at or before it, so it still lands correctly when grouping has changed
underneath it -- a run folding differently, two halves of a reply
becoming one message -- and the page-back loop gains an exact stop,
because `oldestSeq` walks strictly backwards and a row always matches
once the window passes the anchor. It cannot run to seq 1 any more.
`TranscriptRow` now carries `startSeq` beside `key`, and the two are
documented against each other: `key` is the list's identity and a display
decision, `startSeq` is a place in the conversation. Anything that has to
point at a place and find it later uses the second.
Two more found while testing this, both the same shape -- a listener
waiting for a scroll to *end* never runs when the list moves inside one
frame:
- The anchor was read from `rows`, which a `LaunchedEffect(listState)`
captures from the first composition, where it is empty. Every scroll
saved a null anchor, indistinguishable from being left at the newest
end, so the position was silently never recorded at all. It reads the
live state now, as the paging code beside it already warned it must.
The anchor is also written from the settled *position* rather than from
the scroll flag, because Jump to latest snaps within one frame: it left
the old position recorded, so pressing the control that means "take me
to the end" and coming back put the reader where they had been.
- Jump to latest did not set `followTail` either, which is the same hole
in the sibling and predates today: the view landed at the bottom with
following switched off, and the next message did not bring it along.
The button states what it means now. `followTail` itself stays on the
scroll settle, deliberately -- a keyed list moves its own anchor when a
row arrives, so the position reports itself as scrolled back for a
frame every time a message lands, which is the whole reason that value
is remembered rather than read.
Verified against an echo session grown to 1,327 events between saving the
position and reopening, so the newest window slid and the runs were
renamed: the same row is on screen before and after, it appears 419ms in
and never moves, and a 200-piece streamed reply still follows the bottom
after a jump.
The threading of `loadOlderPage`'s fold is ai-app-2's, not touched here.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Five things Iris asked for, all about the transcript screen holding still
around whoever is reading it.
A tool call opened on its own stayed open when a second call in the same
run turns it into a group. Watching a Bash call and having the session
make another one used to shut the card being read and fold it behind
"Called 2 tools" -- the reader lost their place because something else
happened. The transition is noticed once, at the moment a run first
becomes a group; after that the group's own toggle owns it, so shutting a
group whose inner call is still expanded does not re-open it.
The compaction clock is taken from the `compacting` status event's own
timestamp rather than from this device noticing one, so it survives
leaving the session and coming back -- it used to disappear, because the
only thing that knew when the compaction started was a screen that had
been disposed. The server timestamps every transcript line, so this is
still a measurement; it is compared against the phone's wall clock, which
is the same comparison a session's "last active" already makes.
Session settings are a dialog over the session instead of a screen below
it. Two controls did not warrant a page transition and a back stack, and
the thing they change was hidden while they were on screen. Captions are
gone -- each control is a labelled noun -- and "Notify me" is
"Notifications" with a bell beside it (`md-bell`, added to the committed
Nerd Fonts subset). Failures keep their words, since those are what a
reader cannot work out by looking.
Tool groups are rounded like every other card, their foot bar is the same
height as their heading (both derived from the heading's own line height,
so the pair cannot drift), and the calls inside are a connected stack:
square where they face a neighbour, rounded on the outside, with a small
gap so the join reads as a join.
Scroll position is persistent on the device, per session, keyed by the
row rather than by an index -- an index means nothing across a reopen,
where the transcript is fetched newest-first. Reopening pages backwards
until that row is loaded *and* has something older behind it, because the
oldest loaded row is a half-row that grows when the page behind it
arrives; anchoring into one landed a screen and a half out. The list
draws nothing until the position lands, so there is no frame in which the
transcript is somewhere other than where it was left.
Two things found on the way. `snapshotFlow`'s first emission is the state
before anybody has touched the list, and reading it as a scroll that had
just ended at the newest end wiped every saved position on the way in.
And backwards pages now ask for 800 events rather than 80: ai-app-2
measured a real transcript at 2,426 events for seven assistant messages,
so a page of eighty is a fifth of one row and filling the lookahead took
about thirty sequential round trips -- seconds of a list that will not
move, over the tunnel.
`/tools [n] [gap]` in the echo driver takes seconds between calls, which
is what makes a run grow slowly enough for somebody to have opened one of
its calls first.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Both faults needed a real conversation to see, so `app/debug-transcript.sh`
now puts one on the emulator: it copies a Claude Code transcript into /tmp,
gives an ai-server a HOME of its own so the import can only see the copy, and
enrols the app against it. The transcript itself never enters this repository
-- those files hold whatever was said, read and written in a session. Beside
it, `ai-server --delay MS` holds every response back, because a phone's
requests take tens to hundreds of milliseconds over the tunnel and several
faults live entirely in what the app does while one is outstanding.
**Scrolling up threw the reader back to the newest end, once.** `followTail`
is deliberately a remembered answer, rewritten only when a scroll settles, so
for the whole of a fling it still reports the newest end -- where the reader
was when they threw it. A page of history landing during that fling is a
change in the item count, and the correction written for an insertion at the
newest end fired for one at the oldest. Captured on the emulator:
scrolling=true atNewest=false followTail=true
history: START last=20 total=28
history: page of 80 events -> rows now 36
countChanged count=36 followTail=true scrolling=true
>>> scrollToItem(0) SNAP
It could happen only once, which is what made it look arbitrary rather than
mechanical: the snap settles the scroll at the newest end, so the next fling
gets far enough to settle away from it, and from then on `followTail` is
false. So the list is no longer moved while a scroll is running, which is a
rule of its own rather than a refinement of that condition -- and skipping
the correction outright is right rather than merely safe, because the count
can only grow at the newest end while the reader is already there, `record`
holding everything else until they come back.
**A page of history stalled the frame it appeared in.** Parsing is the
expensive half of drawing a reply and costs in proportion to what was
written: against this transcript one message took 51ms and several took
10-25ms, where the synthetic replies this was tuned on took 4.6ms. So each
page's replies are parsed on a background thread as the page arrives --
after the join, since a boundary falling through a reply leaves a message
made of both halves whose text has existed for no time at all, and warming
the page alone warmed the two halves and missed the one thing drawn. A row
with no answer waiting still parses inline: a row measured at nothing before
it is measured at its real height collapses the transcript above it. Misses
are not stored, so a reply still streaming cannot fill the map with copies
of itself on the way to being finished.
Measured over the same twelve flings: 13.5ms average per composed reply
before, 7us after, the remaining parse being one message at session open.
Verified with ui-trace at 1kHz: with a page landing mid-drag the suppression
fires and the row the reader is on moves monotonically down, 266 -> 1063,
with no step backwards; at rest 0 of 65 elements move. 86 server tests pass,
ktfmt/lint/clippy clean.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
A session adopted at a backend start keeps the transcript's last status,
so one whose process had been reported gone and was then found again
read as `exited` while its CLI was running. `exited` is the word that
draws the phone's Start button and lets `start_session` build a driver,
so Start was accepted every time it was pressed -- and since starting
replaces the driver without retiring the old one, each press left
another reader on the same process. Every line the CLI wrote was then
translated once per reader: three presses put three interleaved copies
of one reply on screen, which is what it was reported as.
So `exited` is now checked against `session::process`, the one authority
on whether a process exists, in `launch` and again in `start_session`. A
record that is not known to be dead makes it false, and what replaces it
is `unknown` -- there is a process, and nothing here has heard from it,
which is the answer `status_of_unlaunched` already gave to the same
question. The correction goes out through the sink rather than into the
manager's view alone, or the list and the session screen would disagree
about it in the way this same button did a commit ago.
A driver that `start_session` replaces now gets `Driver::detach`, which
already existed for the backend going away and is the whole of what a
driver whose process has exited is owed.
On the phone the process button is disabled while its own request is in
flight, so a second press cannot be decided against a status the first
has not changed yet. That is a courtesy rather than the fix; the server
refuses it either way, because a phone that has lost the stream cannot
be relied on to know.
Verified against a stand-in CLI, with the state forced by hand: before,
three Starts returned 204 and left four readers on one process and the
status still `exited`; after, the session reports `unknown` on both
surfaces and all three are refused. Then driven on the emulator --
Stop, Start, Stop, Start alternated correctly with one process at a
time, and the list, the transcript and the record all agree.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Scrolling was laggy, and measuring said where the time went. Instrumenting
the transcript's main-thread work on the emulator, against `/stream 200`:
markdown parsing ran fifty-eight times in three seconds -- once per streamed
delta, each one re-parsing the whole message the reply had grown into -- for
49-78ms of main-thread work per three seconds, with single parses reaching
7.3ms. That is most of a frame at 60Hz and more than a whole one at 120.
Everything else the transcript does per event was under a tenth of it.
So only the first parse stays on the composing thread. That one has to: the
renderer's asynchronous path draws an empty loading slot until its result
arrives, which measures a row at nothing before it is measured at its real
height, and the whole transcript above it collapses and springs back. Every
parse after the first is the same row growing, and there is a previous parse
to keep drawing until the new one lands -- so those go to a background
thread and no frame is ever without a height. What is on screen stays a real
prefix of the reply rather than a guess at it; it is simply one parse behind.
The same measurement found `loaded` costing an ArrayList copy per event, and
nothing reading it. It recorded every event the screen had ever seen against
the possibility that a page arriving in front of them would need the events
themselves to stitch on -- but `joinPages` heals the boundary from the folded
rows and has since it was written, so this was a list that only ever grew.
Checked on the emulator with ui-trace at 1kHz. Streaming at the newest end:
the row's bottom edge holds at y=1940 while it grows upward, and the header,
status row and composer do not move for six seconds. Scrolled back with a
reply streaming: nothing moves at all, 0 of 45 elements over five seconds.
Scrolling a mixed transcript: rows keep a constant height as they translate,
so none of them arrives blank and fills in afterwards.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The composer's second button now says what pressing it would do to the
process behind the session, in one place that is always there: an orange
pause while a turn is running (interrupt, the process stays), a red stop
when it is not (end the process), a green play when it has exited (start it
again on the same conversation). Send is disabled while there is nothing to
send, rather than pressable and silent.
Behind it, two routes. `stop` signals the recorded process and says nothing
else -- the driver's own reader already reports a death correctly, and
announcing it here would be a guess ahead of the measurement. `start`
replaces the driver and nothing else, so the transcript, the pump and every
open phone's stream stay where they were and there is still one writer of
the transcript; it is refused unless the session is known to have exited,
since starting on `Unknown` is the two-CLIs-on-one-conversation fault.
That last rule found a bug in the launch path: a relaunched session took its
status from the transcript, so one whose process had died before a backend
restart reported `exited` while the launch had just started a new process --
which refuses every command and offers a phone the chance to start a second
CLI on a live conversation. A launch that leaves a process running now says
idle.
The icon font moves to the Mono face, where every glyph is one em square, so
two icon buttons are the same width without either being told one; the
proportional advances ran 0.46 to 0.92 em and Send came out visibly wider
than Stop. GLYPH_SIZE comes down to match, since a glyph that fills its em
draws bigger at the same point size.
Verified against a stand-in CLI on the emulator: idle -> stop -> exited ->
start -> idle, a turn interrupted from the pause button, and both buttons
measured at 171x105 device pixels.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Everything that opens now behaves alike. Touch a row's upper half and its
top edge holds, so it opens and closes downwards; touch the lower half and
the bottom edge holds, which is what the list does on its own. A group's
heading and the bar at its foot fall in the halves they already occupy, so
they keep the behaviour they had, and a single tool call -- one card, with
no bar -- gets the same choice for the first time: tapping low on an open
Bash card now shuts it downwards exactly as a group's bar does.
That makes the position of the tap the one mechanism, and RowEdge goes
away with the pair of hardcoded ends it existed to name. Controls report
where they were touched in root coordinates, which is all a control can
know -- a group is one row with a control at each end and calls in the
middle, and only the row knows where its own ends are -- and the row turns
that into an edge.
`clickableAt` is built on `clickable` rather than replacing it, so the
ripple and the click action assistive technology reads are unchanged; the
down position is observed on the initial pointer pass and nothing is
consumed.
Verified with ui-trace: on a collapsed group, a tap at y=1370 holds the
heading and one at y=1450 lets the row grow upward instead. On the same
nested call inside an open group, opening it from the group's upper half
holds the heading at 565 and from the lower half moves it to 296. ktfmt,
lint and 85 tests clean.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The correction ran in a coroutine, so it landed a frame or more after the
layout it was correcting: the wrong position was drawn once and then fixed,
which reads as a flick and gets worse the faster the screen refreshes. That
is a race with the display rather than a bug that can be tuned out, so the
fix is not a shorter delay but a different phase.
It now happens in the layout phase. `Modifier.holdTopEdge` learns the row's
new height from the measurement that produced it and asks the list to shift
by exactly that much, before anything is drawn. `requestScrollToItem` is
the form that may be asked for during layout; `dispatchRawDelta` is not --
it calls forceRemeasure and dies with "performMeasureAndLayout called
during measure layout", which cost one crash to establish.
The arming flag and the per-row height are deliberately not snapshot state.
Both are written from layout, where a snapshot write that composition reads
would schedule another recomposition -- another frame, which is the thing
being removed.
This also drops the machinery the previous attempt needed: no waiting on a
size change, no timeout, no marking the rows above to find one that could
still report the move. A row measures itself, so a row that shrinks out of
the viewport is no longer a special case.
Verified with ui-trace sampling at ~1kHz, where a single bad frame would
show as ten to twenty samples: expanding and collapsing from a heading are
each one step from old position to held position with nothing in between,
collapsing from the foot bar holds the four rows below it, a drag 120ms
after a tap is left alone, and scrolling back stays put for six seconds.
ktfmt, lint and 85 tests clean.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Reinstates the reverted downward-opening rows with the two defects that
made the first attempt worse than what it replaced.
The correction waited on the row's top edge and could wait up to half a
second for it to move. A top edge also moves when the reader scrolls, so a
correction still pending would wake on their drag, read the scroll distance
as the row's growth, and undo it -- the transcript jumping on every expand
and refusing to scroll back at all. It now waits on the row's *size*, which
nothing but a resize changes.
The second is why collapsing a group taller than the screen did nothing at
all. Such a group is the list's own anchor item, so as it shrinks it slides
down behind its anchored bottom edge and out of the viewport, and its size
reads as null -- which `withTimeoutOrNull` cannot tell from the null that
means the wait expired. The case most needing the correction was the one
silently skipped. The wait now answers a value that a timeout cannot, and
the distance is read off any row from the pressed one upwards, all of which
move by exactly the row's growth.
Verified on the emulator with ui-trace (~/.local/bin), which samples the
accessibility tree at 60Hz and reports node bounds in device pixels:
expanding and collapsing from a heading hold it to the pixel, collapsing
from the foot bar holds all four rows below it, a drag 120ms after a tap is
left alone, and scrolling back stays put for six seconds. ktfmt, lint and
85 tests clean.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
This reverts commit f4d4c82. The anchoring it added made the transcript
jump on every expand and collapse, and left the list snapping back to the
bottom when somebody scrolled up, which is worse than the upward-opening
it was meant to fix.
Two things to look at when this is retried. `LazyListItemInfo.offset` in a
`reverseLayout` list is not obviously the coordinate space this assumed,
so `offset + size` may have been measuring the bottom edge -- the one the
list already holds -- rather than the top. And the anchoring scroll ran in
a coroutine that could still be pending when the reader started dragging;
`scrollBy` takes the default mutation priority, so it cancels that drag.
Verify the next attempt with `uiautomator dump` -- node bounds in device
pixels, before and after a toggle -- rather than by eye from screenshots.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Tapping a group's heading used to send that heading up off the top of the
screen and fill the space above it, so the calls appeared on the far side
of the control that produced them. The transcript is laid out from the
bottom, so every row's bottom edge is what the list holds still and all
growth goes upward.
The rule now is that the end the reader pressed is the end that must not
move. A heading anchors the top, so the row opens downwards under it; the
bar at the foot of an open group anchors the bottom, so shutting it from
there leaves what follows the group where it is -- which is what already
happened, but by accident of the layout rather than on purpose, and would
have been lost the moment anything else changed.
Bottom is the list's own behaviour and costs nothing. Top is measured
rather than calculated: only the layout knows how tall an open group is,
so `toggleAnchored` reads where the top edge was, lets the change land,
and scrolls by however far it moved.
Applied to every row that opens, not just groups -- a lone tool call and a
peer message are the same gesture, and one of them opening the other way
would be the odder for it.
The notification stream now has three places to land instead of two, decided
in one function. Nothing at all for the session on screen, as before. A
banner over the app while the app is up. Android's drawer otherwise. Never
two of them for one moment: a drawer filling up behind an app that showed
you each one is a drawer nobody reads.
The banners queue, one per session replacing that session's own -- the rule
the drawer already followed, and for the same reason. Each can be tapped,
which opens the session by the same path a tapped notification takes;
pushed off either side; or left alone, in which case the bar across its foot
retires it. The bar and the retiring are one value rather than a bar beside
a timer, so a banner cannot outlive the countdown drawn under it. They clear
when the app goes away, since a claim that a session wants somebody *now*
does not survive an absence -- and the drawer has the job back by then.
Which of the three applies needs no flag anybody keeps level. The session on
screen is registered by the one composable that draws one, and "the app is
up" is the queue being collected, which happens exactly while it is.
Also: tapping a model or permission button while its own menu is open now
closes it. A non-focusable popup does not swallow the press that dismisses
it, so the same finger was reopening what it had just closed -- measured at
3ms between the two, which is what the guard is sized against.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
A session whose loaded rows were shorter than the viewport drew them
against the top of the list, leaving a gap between the newest message and
the box you type in -- and nothing to scroll, because there was no
overflow. Opening the keyboard shrank the viewport enough for the content
to overflow it and the list snapped down, which made a placement fault
look like a scrolling one.
`reverseLayout` defaults the arrangement to `Bottom` on its own, but
naming `spacedBy` replaces that default with `spacedBy`'s own, which is
`Top`. The arrangement is only consulted when the content does not fill
the viewport, which is why this sat here since 2026-08-28 without being
seen: it needs a session that loads less than a screenful, and a page of
tool calls collapsing to one "Called 80 tools" row is how a long
conversation manages that.
Three things about the session screen.
A notification is no longer posted about the session in front of you: the
transcript is already saying it, and one that was posted before you opened
it is cancelled, since a row in the drawer for the conversation on screen
is the same duplication. Bound to RESUMED rather than STARTED, so a session
left on this screen behind another app still reports.
The model and permission menus opened 142px clear of the buttons that
opened them -- the status bar's height, exactly. Compose measures the
anchor in window coordinates, which for an edge-to-edge activity is the
whole display, but asks whether the menu fits inside the visible frame,
which is that less the system bars; sitting just above a control near the
bottom then reads as an overflow and Material3 parks the menu near the
bottom of the visible frame instead. Turning clipping off makes both
questions about the same window.
The model picker now offers "default". The button has always been able to
say it -- that is what a session with no model of its own reads as -- but
the list could not, so choosing any model was a one-way trip. It is the
Claude CLI's own word for "whatever is configured", which its set_model
accepts, so it is a request rather than a name invented here.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
An AskUserQuestion arrived in the middle of a run of tool calls and was
folded into the collapsed card with them, so the one row where somebody
was asked something -- and the answer they gave -- was hidden behind
"Called 6 tools" like any other grep.
It now starts a run of its own and ends the one before it, which needs no
change to the grouping: a run of one is drawn as itself. The calls around
it become a group before and a group after, so where the work stopped to
ask is legible from the shape of the transcript without opening anything.
Echo's `/ask` now runs three ordinary calls on each side of the question,
because that is the shape this has to be looked at in and there was no
way to produce it.
The number on the status row was a running total of tokens spent, so it
could only ever climb: a session compacted from 128k down to 10k, or
cleared outright, went on reporting the larger figure, and disagreed with
the divider directly above it saying what the compaction had recovered.
It now reports what the model is holding -- prompt plus both cache
figures -- folded through `driver::context_after`, which is the one rule
the pump, the transcript and the phone all use: a turn sets it, a
compaction replaces it with what the compaction measured, and a clear
leaves it unmeasured. Unmeasured says so in words, because an empty
context and one nobody has counted used to look identical.
Taken from the turn's last assistant message rather than its `result`:
measured against CLI 2.1.237, a two-message turn reported a cache read of
40,211, being 14,259 and 25,952 -- the same conversation counted twice,
and no size the model ever held.
Tapping a notification landed on whatever the app was last showing. It now
opens the session it named. The id rides in the intent's data rather than an
extra, because PendingIntent identity is Intent.filterEquals -- with an extra
every session's notification would share one PendingIntent and every tap would
open whichever session was notified last. MainActivity sorts the aiapp:// URI
by host, so enrollment and this are one entry point rather than two.
The notification carries only an id, so the session is fetched before there is
a screen; a fetch that fails says so and offers to try again, since somebody
deliberately tapped and an app that opens to the list explains nothing.
That made session-to-session navigation reachable for the first time, and it
crashed: SessionScreen remembers a transcript and an event stream, and without
a key Compose kept both across the change and merged two conversations into
duplicate list keys. Keyed on the session id.
The two transcript dividers now say only what they are, centred between two
rules: "Compacted <bullet> 128,402 -> 9,617 tok" in blue, and "Context cleared"
in red. The rules stay the ordinary divider colour -- they are framing, and the
words are what carries the meaning.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Investigating a `/clear` that did nothing. What I could measure says the
basic path is sound: the CLI honours `/clear` in stream-json mode -- it
emits `conversation_reset`, opens a fresh session id, and the model then
answers "NO CONTEXT" to a question about something it was told a moment
before -- and a `/clear` sent into a running turn is queued here and applied
at the boundary, with the model losing context, in two reproductions.
What the investigation did find is a command that can wait forever. Held
commands drain at the next idle, and a session whose process is gone has no
next idle, so `/clear` sent to one sat in the queue with a waiting bubble on
the phone that nothing could resolve and nothing anywhere saying why. The
*message* path has always answered this case -- a message to the same
session reports the exit at once -- which is what made the silence visible:
one session answered one and swallowed the other. A command owes the same
answer, since what makes it unanswerable is the same fact.
`Unknown` still waits. It means nobody could find out whether the process is
there and it resolves itself, so refusing on it would turn "we don't know"
into "it's gone".
`local_command` gets the `closed` check `send_user_message` has had all
along, for the window between the status being read and the line being
written -- a line into a fifo nothing is reading goes nowhere and looks
exactly like one that arrived.
Attachments now draw under the message text rather than above it: what
somebody wrote is what the bubble is, and it keeps the first line of every
bubble in the same place down the transcript whether or not there is an
image in it.
joinPages healed a tool call split across a page boundary but not a
message split across one, so a long reply came back as two rows with a
paragraph break through the middle of a sentence -- visible on any
session whose replies are longer than an eighty-event page.
Same cause, same cure, and the rule was already written down one member
of the set: `foldEvent` never leaves two assistant messages adjacent
inside a page, since deltas accumulate into the message before them, so
two meeting at a join are always halves of one reply.
The newer half keeps its identity for the reason adoptRun gives -- it is
the row already on screen. It grows by what the older half brings, which
is safe at this join and nowhere else: the join is at the oldest end of
what is loaded, so the growth extends off the top, away from the row the
list anchors to.
Two things that made scrolling back feel like work.
The jump-to-newest button animated. An animated scroll travels the whole
transcript, so the further back somebody has read the longer the press
takes -- the one control whose cost grows with how much there is to
skip, which is backwards. It goes straight there now.
History loaded a page per gesture, and a page is eighty *events*. Eighty
events are routinely one row: a reply arrives as hundreds of text deltas
that fold into a single message. So a page could land and leave the far
end exactly where it was -- and since the far end moving is what asks
for the next page, nothing did. The list then only loaded when somebody
dragged it again, which is what "it only loads when you touch the top"
was. It now keeps fetching until there are rows behind the reader again,
and starts doing that a cushion before the end rather than at it.
Measured on a session of five very long replies, about two thousand
events: reaching the oldest message used to stall at every drag; it now
takes flings alone, and the jump back to the newest end is one frame.
Sending an image was broken in the way that is hardest to see from the
phone: a camera photo is twelve megapixels and several megabytes, the Claude
API resizes anything past 1568px on its long edge before looking at it and
refuses far larger outright, so the picture was uploaded whole over the
tunnel to be thrown away or rejected at the other end.
Shrunk on the phone, to a limit the server states. Which number it is comes
from the provider's *kind* -- `DriverKind::max_image_edge`, reported on the
session row -- because that is where a provider's requirements are known,
and a phone carrying its own copy of them would be a second place to update
when one changes. `None` where nothing cares, rather than a large number:
"no limit" and "a limit that happens to be big" are different answers and
only one of them stays true. Doing it before the upload rather than after is
the point -- the expensive part on a phone is the tunnel, not the decode --
and an image already inside the limit is uploaded byte for byte rather than
being round-tripped through JPEG for nothing.
EXIF orientation is applied while scaling. The camera writes which way up
the picture is into a tag rather than into the pixels, and re-encoding drops
it, so a portrait photo would have arrived at the model on its side with
nothing anywhere saying so.
**What is attached is now visible before it is sent**, in a row directly
above the box it will be sent from: the count on the "+" button said how
many and never which, so the only way to find out what you had picked was to
send it. It scrolls sideways rather than shrinking, and tapping one takes it
back off -- an image picked by mistake could otherwise only be dealt with by
sending it. The tile is outlined as well as filled, because most of what
gets attached here is a screenshot of a dark app and a cropped one is
near-black: without an edge the only thing on screen saying an image was
attached was the cross drawn on top of nothing.
**And the picture is inside the bubble that sent it.** Attachments used to
be their own `Image` events emitted just before the message, which drew
somebody's screenshot as a row floating above the bubble and left the phone
deciding from adjacency alone which message an image belonged to -- a thing
the sender knew and could simply say. `UserMessage`, `MessageQueued` and
`MessageTaken` carry the refs now, so a waiting message keeps its picture
for as long as the turn runs, and a replay puts it back in the same place.
Verified on a real claude-cli session rather than an echo one, since the
limit only exists for that kind: a 3000x4000 image arrived as 1176x1568
JPEG -- long edge exactly the limit, aspect ratio intact -- and haiku
answered "AI Sessions displays idle Photo", which is what the picture was.
No error, and the transcript records the message with `images` on it.
Two separate defects, both of which moved the list under the reader.
The first: a row that grows drags the view toward the newest end. The
list is laid out from the bottom, so it anchors on the first visible
item's *bottom* edge -- and a reply streaming in extends that row
upwards, pushing everything already on screen with it. Measured against
a reply streamed in four hundred pieces: scrolling back one screen and
waiting six seconds ended at the very bottom, forty lines further on
than where it was left. So the transcript now only changes while the
reader is at the newest end; anything arriving before then waits in
order and lands when they return. Status, tokens and the model still
update live, because none of those are drawn in the list and freezing
them would trade a jumping transcript for a status row that lies.
The second: every markdown row was measured at nothing before it was
measured at its real height. The renderer's `content: String` overload
parses in a coroutine and draws an empty loading slot until it finishes,
so a row composes with no height and springs open a frame later. Seen
with five replies on screen at once, all blank, the whole conversation
shrunk to a single screen. Parsing in the composition costs a few
milliseconds on the main thread and is worth it: no scroll anchoring can
survive a row that lies about its height first.
`/stream N` in the echo driver is what made the first one reproducible
-- `/slow` emits a line a second, and the growth has to be continuous
for the anchor row to drag.
Verified on the emulator: scrolled back through a whole 400-piece
stream, the transcript region is pixel-identical across ten seconds
while the status row goes from working to idle; returning to the bottom
brings the backlog in one go. Checked the tool-call rig too, which this
change had no reason to touch -- paging back still works and every group
still reads "Called 8 tools".
A group of adjacent tool calls was identified by its first call, and the
list is keyed by that identity. But a run can gain members at *either*
end -- a new call arriving beside it, or a page of history arriving in
front of it -- so its first member is not a name, it is a description
that changes. Every time it changed, the row was a different row as far
as the list was concerned: the anchor went with it, and the transcript
stepped under whoever was reading.
Each call now carries the run it belongs to, decided once when it is
folded in and never recomputed, and the row keys on that. A lone call
that gains a neighbour becomes a group *without* changing identity,
which the old key got wrong in the other direction too -- one row was
replaced by another rather than updated.
`joinPages` hands the arriving older calls the name of the run they are
joining, rather than renaming that run after them. The obvious way round
is the wrong one: the newer half is the part already on screen, so
naming the joined run after the older half renames the row the reader is
looking at, which is the whole failure this is meant to remove.
Checked against the same twelve-`/tools 8` rig, whose page boundary falls
inside the second group: every group still reads eight, so the grouping
is unchanged -- what changed is that none of their identities move.
Toward the standing rule for this screen, which is that it may only move
when the reader is at the newest end and something new arrives.
Code is not a literal. Green is what this palette colours a literal, so
painting a whole fenced block green said the block *was* one -- and it
disagreed with the syntax highlighter a tool call's input already gets,
where green means a string and peach means a number. Code blocks and inline
spans now take the ordinary text colour; the monospace face and the tinted
background are what say "this is code", which is the part colour was not
doing. `codeColor` goes with it, since nothing else wanted a colour for
code. Where a literal really does appear inside code, the thing that should
colour it is a highlighter reading the code, not a rule about the container.
`run-android.sh` derives its AVD name from the checkout instead of defaulting
to a machine-wide `tdep`. That default made the emulator the one thing here
that cannot be worked on in parallel: two clones of this repo meant asking
whoever had it, waiting, and handing it back, and installing onto a running
one takes the foreground from whatever they were looking at. Derived rather
than written down, so neither clone names the other's, and `AVD_NAME=` still
overrides for sharing one deliberately.
Also: two things reported as markdown defects yesterday were not defects,
and are worth recording so nobody fixes them twice. The table is not
clipped -- it scrolls horizontally, which the renderer does whenever the
columns are wider than the screen; a screenshot of one looks exactly like a
clipped table, and swiping it shows the rest. The paragraph that appeared to
break around an inline code span was an artifact of how the test text was
sent through the echo driver, not of the renderer: sent as one message it
flows correctly.
Three readings that were each a part presented as the whole.
**"just now", everywhere, after a restart.** A relaunched session took its
last-activity from the clock, so every session the backend brought back
claimed to have been active that instant. On the phone that is every row
reading "just now" and the list -- which sorts by it -- coming back in an
order that means nothing, with the conversation somebody was in the middle
of buried among sessions untouched for days. It comes from the transcript
now, in the pass `Transcript::open` already makes, which is the same
correction `last_status` got and for the same reason: a server that has just
started has been told nothing, and the file is the only thing it knows. The
test backdates a transcript by a day, so it cannot pass by the test being
fast; it fails on the old code with the clock's answer in the message.
**The token total was the newest page's.** The phone added up the
`UsageDelta`s it had received, and it opens a session on the newest page of
the transcript -- so a long conversation reported its last few turns as the
total, and a page with no turn in it reported nothing at all, since zero is
drawn as blank. That is the reading Bryan saw: no tokens, on sessions that
had certainly spent some.
The count belongs to the server, which is the only side that sees every
turn. `UsageDelta` now carries the running total beside the delta, filled in
by the pump rather than by each driver -- a driver knows what its own turn
cost and nothing else does, so a new one cannot get this wrong by leaving it
out -- and the session row reports it for a screen that has not opened the
stream yet. The phone takes the largest total it has seen instead of
accumulating, which also means paging older history cannot move it, and
leaves the seeded figure alone for transcripts recorded before the field
existed. Seeded by summing deltas at startup for exactly that reason.
**The header said the model twice and the machine backwards.** A session's
subtitle now reads `machine · provider`, in that order and with no "on"
joining them, matching the list and the usage dialog -- the "on" made it a
phrase, which works in one order and stops working the moment the same pair
is shown somewhere else. The model is gone from it: the footer's picker
already shows what the session is set to, and two places showing it meant
two things to keep in step, which disagreed for a moment on every switch
since one follows the request and the other the session's own answer.
Checked on the emulator against a twelve-turn session whose visible page
held the last six: the header reads "this machine · echo", the status row
reads "idle", and the total reads 42 tok, which is what `GET
/sessions/{id}` says rather than what the page adds up to.
Leaving the app and returning left "Couldn't reach the server" sitting at
the top of a list the server would by then answer perfectly well, and
nothing took it off until somebody pressed Refresh.
The four tabs draw a snapshot of a backend they are not connected to, so
what they show is only as fresh as the last answer. A stale *list* is a
small thing. A stale failure is not: it is a claim about right now, and
it is wrong in the direction that makes somebody go looking for a problem
that has already gone.
Returning to the foreground now bumps the same token the Refresh button
uses. One instruction the tabs already understand rather than a second
path into each of them -- which is also what makes this cover Import,
Models and Setups rather than only the list the report came from. Not on
first entry, since the tab composing already asks and bumping there would
make every cold start fetch twice.
Reproduced and fixed against the same sequence: server stopped, app
opened so the load fails, server started, app backgrounded and resumed
from the launcher. Before, the error is still there; after, the list is
drawn and current.
Three things Bryan asked for, and one the second of them exposed.
**Notifications.** A session that asks a question or finishes a turn now
says so on the phone, per session, switchable from its settings screen.
The switch is stored on the backend rather than the phone, because it is a
fact about the session: one that runs unattended overnight should be quiet
on every device, and answering that question again on each device is how two
of them come to disagree. It is on by default -- a notification nobody
wanted is turned off in one tap, where one that never arrived is not
diagnosable at all.
Which moments count is `notification_for`, and the asymmetry in it is the
point. *Waiting on a person* is worth saying however it was reached.
*Finished* is only worth saying when this server watched the work happen:
sessions settle into idle for several reasons that are not "your work
ended", including every one of them being adopted at startup, and announcing
those would put "finished" on the phone for the whole config on every
backend restart. That is the failure that makes somebody switch the feature
off, so it has a test naming every transition rather than the two that
work.
The stream is `GET /notifications`, live only and with no cursor -- the one
place this server does not offer to catch a client up. A notification is a
claim about now; replaying "your turn" from an hour ago sends somebody to a
session that may have been answered from another device since, and a
notification that is wrong costs the trip *and* the credibility of the next
one. What was missed is still on the session list, which says what is
waiting without claiming to be news.
On the phone it is a foreground service, because Android has had no
long-lived background service since 8.0 -- it is what Syncthing does, and
Discord is not a counter-example since it takes a push from Google, which
would mean this backend talking to Google about somebody's sessions. The
ongoing notification Android charges for it sits on an `IMPORTANCE_MIN`
channel: no sound, no status-bar icon, bottom of the shade. `specialUse`
rather than `dataSync`, which is what it looks like: Android 15 caps
dataSync at six hours a day, and a connection that stops listening after six
hours misses the overnight run it exists for.
**A stop is not an error.** The CLI reports an interrupted turn exactly as
it reports a broken one -- `is_error` on a `result` -- so pressing Stop
showed "the turn ended with an error" for doing what the button says. The
line cannot distinguish them; what does is that this side asked, so the
driver says so before the request goes out and the translator spends that on
the next result. The test's second half is the one that matters: the naive
fix passes the first half and silences every genuine failure after it.
**Every status says which one it is.** The session screen's status row named
only `exited` and left the rest blank, so idle and "nobody could read it"
looked identical -- and a just-stopped turn showed nothing, which reads as
the app having lost the session rather than as the stop having worked. The
words are the session list's own, so a state is not called two things
depending which screen you are on. Red on a quota bar now starts at 90%.
**`GET /sessions/{id}`**, which the notification switch found missing. A
screen opened from a list row carries the row the list last fetched: fine
for a title, wrong for a switch, which is *set to* something. Caught on the
emulator, where the switch read on against a backend that said off, with
nothing on screen to say which was true. The screen now reads the session
when it opens, and until that answers the switch is disabled and says so --
a two-position control cannot say "I do not know", so it does not pretend
to.
Verified on the emulator with the app backgrounded: the service holds the
stream (`isForeground=true types=0x40000000`), a finished turn posts
"Finished" and a question replaces it with "Waiting for you" on the same
tag, turning the switch off silences it with no restart, and turning it back
on from the phone reaches config.ron. The interrupt is a translator test
rather than a live turn, which is where that logic is anyway.
A page boundary lands wherever it lands, and about half the time that is
between a tool call and its result. The newer page then holds a `ToolEnd`
whose start it never saw, which the fold draws as a row of its own --
correctly, since a call rendering as nothing is indistinguishable from
one that never happened. But when the older page arrived it brought the
real `ToolStart`, and the two lists were concatenated, so the call was
left on screen twice: once as a proper card and once as a nameless
placeholder.
`joinPages` merges the two halves by the call's own id instead, which is
the one thing a page boundary cannot destroy. The older half wins on what
a start knows -- the tool's name, its input -- and the newer on what an
end knows, its output and whether it finished.
The miscount was the visible part; the moving was the point. The extra
row sits exactly at the join, which is where the reader is looking when
the page loads, so everything below it stepped down by a row at the
moment they scrolled into it.
Demonstrated both ways round on a rig of twelve `/tools 8` runs, whose
groups are eight calls each and whose page boundary falls inside the
second one: without this the transcript reads "Called 9 tools" there and
eight everywhere else, with it every group reads eight.
That rig is `/mixed N` in the echo driver, added here: N beats of
paragraphs at three lengths, single tool calls, runs of adjacent ones,
images and peer messages -- every row shape the app draws, in one
session, from a command that costs nothing and produces the same
transcript every time. The paragraphs are deliberately ragged, because a
wall of identical lines looks the same at every offset and makes a scroll
of one line indistinguishable from a scroll of ten, by eye or by
comparing frames.
Queue is the paper plane with a clock on it (`md-send_clock`) rather than
the plain plane plus the word: the pair is now told apart by the mark, which
is what an icon is for, and the word survives as the button's accessible
name where a screen reader still needs it.
The three composer buttons take their colour from what pressing one does --
green sends now, blue sends later, red takes the running turn away -- and
Stop becomes a filled button like the other two. Outlined said it was a
qualifier on the primary action; it is a second thing you can do about the
turn, and what separates them is the colour and the mark. The fills are
named in Theme.kt with their content colour stated beside them, because a
semantic colour has to carry its own contrast: these do not change with the
surface, so nothing will rescue a foreground that stops being readable.
Worth knowing when reading that file: the action greens and reds sit next to
a `runningColor` green and a `failedColor` red, which are *states*. Nothing
in one set is pressable and nothing in the other is a state, so a reader
never has to tell them apart.
The usage read-out loses its per-machine cards. A card is a step up the
surface ladder and inside a dialog -- already a raised surface -- the step
barely rendered while costing 16dp on every side. The machine and the
service it answered for are one small quiet line instead of a heading over a
subtitle, since the numbers underneath are what somebody opened this to see.
The gaps between the bars now go *between* them rather than after each,
which is what put a band of empty dialog above Close. The rest of that band
was AlertDialog's own spacing, fixed at sizes meant for a sentence of prose
and a decision, so this is a plain Dialog with the same container colour and
corner and spacing chosen for a dense read-out.
Looked at on the emulator: green send, then blue queue beside red stop
during a `/slow 20` echo turn, and the dialog over the live session. The
account had risen to 78% by then, which showed the five-hour bar and the
header glyph going yellow on real numbers rather than forced ones.
iris
