feat(composer): surface live agent activity in status pills by tellaho · Pull Request #2646 · block/buzz

tellaho · 2026-07-23T23:16:52Z

Category: improvement
User Impact: Working agents now appear as compact composer status pills that show their latest action, preview live activity on hover, and open the full session on click.

Problem: The combined “agents working” control hid which agent was doing what, shifted the composer when it mounted, and required an extra interaction to understand recent activity. Human typing and agent activity also competed for space without a clear signal hierarchy, while crowded thread composers could compress activity labels until they were unreadable.

Solution: Replace the combined control with a fixed-height pill strip for observer-backed agents, while grouping typing-only agents with human typers. Pills preserve turn-start ordering, retain the latest meaningful channel-scoped headline for the life of the turn, freeze safely while hovered, preview the shared compact activity feed, and open the full agent session on click. Thread-only bot typers stay in the combined typing group until channel-scoped observer activity provides a real session to preview, then promote to a pill while retaining the truthful “is typing…” label.

File changes

Agent working state: Adds channel-scoped observer/typing signals and pure helpers for capability partitioning, persistent headlines, turn-start ordering, and archive-aware recency.
Composer UI: Replaces the combined trigger with animated per-agent pills, shared hover-card control, responsive overflow affordances, and a fixed-height activity row shared by the main composer.
Thread composer: Applies the same capability partition without leaking thread typing into channel-wide working state; transcript-less agent typers remain non-interactive until observer activity exists.
Activity preview: Reuses the managed agent transcript presentation in an inert compact hover preview and shares Last-live formatting with the profile panel.
Typing presentation: Combines typing-only agents with human typers and supports composer-specific styling.
Tests: Covers label selection, filtering, ordering, hover stability, click-through, overflow geometry, focus-mode anchoring, and thread typing-group-to-pill promotion.

Reproduction steps

Open a channel where one observer-backed agent is working; confirm a fixed-height pill appears with the latest meaningful action.
Emit more actions; confirm the headline updates in place and remains visible without freshness decay while the turn is active.
Hover the pill; confirm its order and width freeze while the compact transcript preview is open.
Click the pill; confirm the full agent session opens.
Start multiple agents; confirm turn-start order is stable, and narrow the composer to verify horizontal overflow fades.
Start a first-ever typing-only agent; confirm it joins the combined typing group rather than exposing an empty activity preview.
In a thread, start a transcript-less agent typer; confirm it remains in the typing group. Add channel-scoped observer activity and confirm it promotes to a pill labeled “is typing…”.
Enable reduced motion; confirm label and pill transitions become immediate.

Screenshots / demos

Narrow composer strip

Hover activity preview

Validation

Validated at cb8118e9cee2b48bfa9fdeb4fe76ef80bac082ae rebased onto origin/main at a7ea86cdcf2aa3cbb1486baabc4c9d6aea8c576c:

Biome on the modified composer/activity files and E2E spec
Desktop TypeScript typecheck
Desktop file-size ratchet (including ChannelPane.tsx at 998 lines)
Focused Playwright regression: thread agent typing promotes only when activity exists — 1 passed
git diff --check
git merge-tree --write-tree HEAD origin/main
Branch metadata audit: all 28 commits authored by Taylor Ho with exactly one contiguous co-author/sign-off pair
Pre-push gates passed: org guard, branch skew, desktop check, full desktop tests, Rust tests, and desktop Tauri checks
Full mobile suite had one unrelated timing-bound failure in relay_session_test.dart (3968ms vs expected 3990–4000ms); the exact failing test passed immediately in isolation

Rebuild of the composer live-activity experiment (old draft PR #1575) on current main primitives. Behind the new off-by-default composerLiveActivity preview feature, the agents-working popover shows one selected working agent's channel-scoped feed at a time: - ComposerLiveActivityFeed reuses ManagedAgentSessionPanel with the compactPreview transcript variant (same primitive as the profile activity embed), so live/archive merging, projection, anchored scrolling, and idle handling stay owned by that surface. - Agent switching via pill tabs (role=tablist) under the preview; selection resolves explicit tab > open session pane > first working agent, and falls through when the selected agent stops working. - Whole preview is one click target with a Last-live recency pill; transcript rows underneath are inert, avoiding nested interactive controls inside a clickable shell. - formatLastLiveLabel extracted from UserProfilePanelTabs into profile/lib/lastLiveLabel so both surfaces share the recency label. With the experiment off, the popover renders the existing agent list unchanged. Co-authored-by: Taylor Ho <taylorkmho@gmail.com> Signed-off-by: Taylor Ho <taylorkmho@gmail.com>

…nd AT Wrap the ManagedAgentSessionPanel subtree in a native inert container so compact transcript rows (which can render keyboard-focusable message links) are removed from pointer, tab-order, and assistive-tech interaction — CSS pointer-events-none only neutralized the mouse. The overlay open button and Last-live pill stay accessible. Also extract deriveLastLiveAt and make it archive-aware: the Last-live pill now takes the newest across the live transcript window, archived channel events, and the active-turn anchor, so it can no longer disagree with archived rows visible in the preview. Co-authored-by: Taylor Ho <taylorkmho@gmail.com> Signed-off-by: Taylor Ho <taylorkmho@gmail.com>

…gent turns - Extract the composer status strip into ChannelComposerActivityRow.tsx (new component hosting the inline bot-activity trigger and the typing indicator, plus the useChannelWorkingAgentPubkeys subscription). Also brings ChannelPane.tsx back under the 1000-line file-size ceiling (1006 -> 969). - Change the row from min-h-8 to a fixed h-8.5 (34px). The inline bot-activity trigger is h-7 (28px), which plus the row's pb-1.5 (6px) made the active row 34px — 2px taller than the 32px idle minimum — so the bottom-anchored composer visibly bumped up whenever an agent turn or bot typing mounted the trigger, and dropped back when it cleared. 34px matches the previous active-state height exactly: the working state renders identically and the idle state now reserves the same space. (Typing indicators alone are 20px of content, under the old minimum, which is why only the agent-activity trigger caused the shift.) - channels.spec.ts: add "composer does not shift when the activity row mounts and clears" e2e test asserting the composer's y-position stays stable across trigger mount and clear. Verified via negative control: with min-h-8 restored the test fails with exactly the 2px delta. Co-authored-by: Taylor Ho <taylorkmho@gmail.com> Signed-off-by: Taylor Ho <taylorkmho@gmail.com>

- BotActivityBar.tsx: replace the combined "agents working" trigger with one pill per working agent (avatar + latest action summary in a rounded-full chip, max-w-30 with truncation so pill widths stay uniform); extract BotActivityAgentPill with per-pill hover popover state (useHoverPopover) and remove the tab strip, tab selection state, and the 5-headline rotation interval - Pill label shows the agent's single latest action headline and decays to a generic "Working…" state once activity goes quiet (15s staleness window, 5s useNow tick); deliberately no rotation between recent actions - Hovering a pill shows the live activity feed as the popover surface itself (w-80 p-0, edge-to-edge, no inset bordered box); clicking the pill opens the agent's full runtime in the auxiliary panel (preventDefault stops Radix's composed trigger toggle from racing the hover/focus open state, which made click-to-open flaky) - composerLiveActivity.ts: add deriveActivityPillLabel pure helper (channel-scoped spine-first scan + staleness decay, ACTIVITY_PILL_STALE_MS = 15s) and remove the now-unused resolveSelectedActivityAgent - composerLiveActivity.test.mjs: replace resolveSelectedActivityAgent tests with 7 deriveActivityPillLabel cases (fresh headline wins, staleness decay, custom window, channel scoping, spine-over-metadata, metadata fallback, empty transcript) - ComposerLiveActivityFeed.tsx: overlay button rounding rounded-lg → rounded-[inherit] so the hover tint follows the popover's rounded-xl clip when the feed renders edge-to-edge - ChannelComposerActivityRow.tsx / ChannelPane.tsx: drop the removed variant prop (the toolbar variant was unused; both call sites rendered inline) - channels.spec.ts: activity-indicator test now hovers the pill for the legacy preview popover and clicks the pill for direct aux-panel open - Flag-off (composerLiveActivity disabled) hover popover keeps the legacy "View activity" item; pills stay h-7 inside the fixed h-8.5 activity row so the composer-shift guard keeps passing Co-authored-by: Taylor Ho <taylorkmho@gmail.com> Signed-off-by: Taylor Ho <taylorkmho@gmail.com>

- BotActivityBar.tsx: extract AnimatedPillSlot around each agent pill — reorders animate with a 0.9s spring (bounce 0.15, subtler overshoot) and an opacity dip via [1, 0.35, 1] keyframes running the same duration with linear easing, so the fade lands together with the layout switch instead of trailing it - Label updates render as a clipped push-up ticker (h-3.5 overflow-hidden container; the new text pushes the old text up and out, 0.28s tween, instant under reduced motion); swaps are deferred while the pill's slot is mid layout animation (AnimatedPillSlot passes isMoving via render prop) and play once the spring settles, otherwise immediately - Ticker keys on the backing transcript item id, not the label string: a genuinely new action animates, while streamed chunks that grow the same item (message first line, thought text) update text in place — fixes phantom re-animations of visually identical truncated text - composerLiveActivity.ts: deriveActivityPillLabel now returns ActivityPillHeadline {id, label} and skips usage_update / available_commands_update lifecycle meta frames, which previously headlined the pill as bare "Usage"/"Commands" between real actions - animations.css: .buzz-shimmer.truncate::before ellipsizes the glow overlay copy the same way as the base text, so the shimmer sweeps the ellipsis instead of revealing the clipped rightmost characters - Pill max width raised from max-w-30 (120px) to max-w-36 (144px) - channels.spec.ts: activity-indicator test now asserts the flag-ON reality (E2E seeds every preview feature, so composerLiveActivity always renders): hovering the pill opens the live-activity feed popover and clicking opens the agent session in the aux panel — replaces the legacy "View activity" item assertions, which only ever passed via a popover toggle race in the pre-pill trigger - composerLiveActivity.test.mjs: object-shape assertions plus new cases — meta frames never headline, meta-only transcripts stay generic, and the headline id stays stable while a message streams (19 tests passing) Co-authored-by: Taylor Ho <taylorkmho@gmail.com> Signed-off-by: Taylor Ho <taylorkmho@gmail.com>

…ster label decay Composer activity strip (BotActivityBar.tsx): - Centralize hover popover state at the strip level (useStripHoverPopover): ONE active pill and ONE timer for the whole strip, replacing per-pill timers that raced each other (double-open on pill-to-pill travel, stuck cards when the cursor clipped an open card) - Freeze pill order, membership, layout animation, and pill widths while the cursor is over the bar or a hover card is showing; queued reorders apply (animated) after the hold releases - Pin the hovered pill's rendered width so label swaps can't shift neighboring pills under the cursor - Open on keyboard focus only for :focus-visible, and preventDefault on the card's close auto-focus, fixing the re-open loop when Radix returned focus to the trigger - Typing-fallback-only agents (working source "typing", no observer turn) now render a passive status pill: borderless, no max-width cap, no hover card, no click-through, not focusable — there is no transcript or session behind the typing signal to open Pill label decay (composerLiveActivity.ts): - Shorten ACTIVITY_PILL_STALE_MS 15s → 6s so pauses in the event stream cycle the pill back to the generic label promptly; tick 5s → 1s - Generic label is now agent-named ("<name> is working…") instead of the bare "Working…" Debug harness (features/agents/debug): - Add per-agent "Typing" toggle simulating the basic "is typing" situation: a synthetic channel-scoped typing entry with no observer turn, exercising the typing-fallback path (useChannelActivityTyping → reportChannelBotTyping → passive pill); independent of Working/Progress so observer-over-typing precedence is testable; "End all turns" also clears typing - useDebugHarnessTypingEntries appends the synthetic entries in useChannelActivityTyping (dev-only, reference-stable when idle) Tests: - channels.spec.ts: e2e coverage for hover-freeze — card freezes pill order with queued reorder applying on close, and bar-hover freeze without an open card - composerLiveActivity.test.mjs: freshness fixtures updated for the 6s stale window Co-authored-by: Taylor Ho <taylorkmho@gmail.com> Signed-off-by: Taylor Ho <taylorkmho@gmail.com>

…is working…" - BotActivityBar.tsx: the generic decay label on a typing-fallback-only pill (working source "typing", no observer turn) now reads "<name> is typing…", matching the human typing indicator's vocabulary; observer-backed pills keep "<name> is working…" - A fresh action headline still wins over both generic labels - Both generic labels share the same ticker id, so a typing → observer source upgrade updates the text in place instead of playing the push-up swap Co-authored-by: Taylor Ho <taylorkmho@gmail.com> Signed-off-by: Taylor Ho <taylorkmho@gmail.com>

…group - ChannelComposerActivityRow.tsx: partition the channel's working set by signal source — observer-backed agents keep the interactive activity pills, while typing-fallback-only agents (no observer turn, nothing to hover or open) are diverted out of the pill strip and merged with the human typers into ONE combined TypingIndicatorRow group with an overlapping avatar set; channel-agent roster names are overlaid onto the profile lookup so roster-only agents never fall back to truncated pubkeys - Fix row layout: the pill strip wrapper and typing row were both flex-1, splitting the row 50/50 and stranding the typing group at the halfway mark — the strip now sizes to content (still shrinkable) and the typing group takes the remainder; row gap set to gap-3, and the typing row's base px-4/sm:px-6 padding is zeroed next to pills (composer-edge alignment padding only applies when the group leads the row) - TypingIndicatorRow.tsx: 4+ typers label now reads "X, Y, and N more are typing..." per spec (was "N others"); new optional labelClassName prop so the composer row can match the pills' font-semibold weight without changing the thread panel's indicator - BotActivityBar.tsx: revert the passive typing pill variant and "is typing…" label — typing-only agents never reach the pill anymore; pill avatar bumped 18px → 20px with a uniform 3px surround (pl-0.75, h-7 minus 1px borders) and asymmetric pr-2 for label breathing room - debug/README.md: document that the harness Typing toggle now renders through the combined typing indicator group Co-authored-by: Taylor Ho <taylorkmho@gmail.com> Signed-off-by: Taylor Ho <taylorkmho@gmail.com>

…composer The thread footer's activity/typing row was centered into an mx-auto max-w-4xl column while the thread composer above it spans the full pane width, so in a wide thread pane the typing indicator floated toward the pane's center instead of hugging the composer's left gutter. - MessageThreadPanel.tsx: drop the mx-auto/max-w-4xl wrapper so the row spans the same width as the composer above it - Remove flex-1 from the toolbarExtraActions (agent pill strip) wrapper — it previously ate half the row and pushed the typing group to the midpoint whenever it mounted; the strip now sizes to its content, mirroring ChannelComposerActivityRow - Make the typing indicator's leading padding conditional like the channel row: composer-edge padding only when the typing group leads the row, pl-0 when it follows pills so the flex gap is the whole spacing Co-authored-by: Taylor Ho <taylorkmho@gmail.com> Signed-off-by: Taylor Ho <taylorkmho@gmail.com>

…ip when narrow Remove the composerLiveActivity preview flag so the live-activity hover preview ships for everyone, and land the pill strip overflow behavior for narrow containers. Flag removal (ships by default): - preview-features.json: drop the composerLiveActivity entry — absence from the manifest means stable/always-on; E2E preview seeding and the Settings > Experiments card both derive from the manifest, so they pick this up automatically - BotActivityBar.tsx: remove the useFeatureEnabled gate and the legacy flag-off "View activity" popover item; the pill hover popover now always renders ComposerLiveActivityFeed - Remove the now-dead openAgentSessionPubkey plumbing through BotActivityAgentPill / BotActivityComposerAction / ChannelComposerActivityRow / ChannelPane — it only backed the legacy item's active-session highlight - Update stale flag references in ComposerLiveActivityFeed's doc comment, the agents debug harness README, and a channels.spec.ts comment Pill strip overflow (BotActivityBar.tsx, ChannelComposerActivityRow.tsx): - With several pills in a narrow container (thread panel toolbars especially), pills keep their natural label-truncated width and the strip scrolls horizontally — scrollbar hidden, edge gradient fades signalling clipped pills — instead of compressing every pill into an unreadable sliver - New useStripOverflowFades hook tracks scroll position plus scroller/content resizes (ResizeObserver) so fades appear and disappear without a re-render triggering event - A lone pill shrinks to fit (min-w-0) instead of scrolling — an edge fade over a single pill reads as a cut-off bug, not an affordance - layoutScroll on the scroller keeps motion's slot layout animations measured relative to the scroll offset - e2e: add "narrow strip scrolls horizontally with edge fades instead of compressing pills" and "lone pill shrinks to fit a narrow container without scroll fades" Verified: tsc, biome check, desktop unit tests (3651 pass), and the pill/strip/live-activity e2e subset. Two pre-existing channels.spec.ts failures ("composer does not shift when the activity row mounts and clears", "hovering the bar itself freezes pill order without opening a card") reproduce identically on the parent commit with a clean tree — unrelated to this change. Co-authored-by: Taylor Ho <taylorkmho@gmail.com> Signed-off-by: Taylor Ho <taylorkmho@gmail.com>

…ation sleeps The composer pill strip only renders observer-backed agents — typing-only agents fold into the combined typing indicator group by design — but the activity-indicator and no-shift e2e tests still summoned the pill via mock typing events, so the pill never mounted and both tests failed at the first toBeVisible. - Rewrite 'shows and clears activity indicators' on __BUZZ_E2E_SEED_ACTIVE_TURNS__: assert the typing-only fold-in first, then the observer-turn promotion (typing indicator clears as the pill mounts), the channel-scoped aux panel with the live transcript, turn_completed clearing the pill, and a fresh turn re-mounting it. - Rewrite 'composer does not shift' on observer-turn seeds and extend it: the fixed-row contract now covers pill mount, pill clear, AND the combined typing group mounting — all within ±0.5px of the idle composer top, which would catch the reported 2px drift. - Make the bar-hover freeze test deterministic: the strip sizes to its content, so 'the bar's empty right side' could land on the trailing pill and open a hover card. Park the cursor in the inter-pill gap instead and wait for the hold's width-pin style before seeding the reorder. - Replace both 1200ms animation sleeps (0.9s spring + 180ms grace left only ~120ms margin on CI) with state-based assertions: the pill label committing the seeded message text proves the store update reached the strip before the frozen-order assertions run. Co-authored-by: Taylor Ho <taylorkmho@gmail.com> Signed-off-by: Taylor Ho <taylorkmho@gmail.com>

- Bleed the pill strip's scroll viewport across the mounting row's px-5 gutter (-mx-5 on the strip root, px-5 restored as scroller padding) so overflowing pills clip at the container's visual edge instead of the row's padded content box — previously a pill faded out mid-row, 20px shy of the edge, with a dead gutter after the gradient - Keep at-rest alignment unchanged: the scroller's internal px-5 keeps the first pill on the row gutter in both mounting surfaces (ChannelComposerActivityRow and the thread panel toolbar row) - Widen the edge fades from w-8 to w-12 so the gradient keeps a soft fade zone over the pills after spanning the 20px gutter - Grow the pill label ticker viewport from h-3.5 to h-4 with a matching leading-4 line box so Inter's descenders ("g", "y") are no longer sheared off the label - Extend the narrow-strip e2e test to assert both fades sit within 1px of the activity row's border-box edges, guarding the full-bleed geometry against regression Co-authored-by: Taylor Ho <taylorkmho@gmail.com> Signed-off-by: Taylor Ho <taylorkmho@gmail.com>

…bels Calm the working-agent pill strip while multiple agents stream: position now encodes identity (stable for a whole turn), liveness stays on the per-pill label tickers, and positional motion is reserved for membership changes (an agent starting or finishing) — the transitions a builder actually needs to notice. Grounded in the work-visibility and completion-awareness JTBDs: transcript-recency ordering shuffled pills on every agent event (cry-wolf motion) and buried quiet/stuck agents at the scrolled-off end of the strip. - composerLiveActivity.ts: replace deriveAgentActivityOrder (transcript recency, newest first) with deriveAgentWorkingOrder — sorts by channel-scoped turn anchorAt ascending (earliest worker left-most, new agents append right), quantized to whole seconds so retroactive clock-offset refinements cannot reorder the strip, stable roster-order tiebreak, no-anchor agents keep roster order at the end - composerLiveActivity.ts: remove the 6s label decay (ACTIVITY_PILL_STALE_MS and the now/staleAfterMs params) — the last real action now persists through quiet stretches; the generic "<name> is working…" label only shows before the first action lands, since the last action is more informative than a placeholder while a turn is in progress - BotActivityBar.tsx: order snapshot subscribes to agentWorkingSignal (turn anchors) instead of the observer store's transcript scan; drop the per-pill useNow(1000) staleness tick so pills no longer re-render every second; hover-freeze machinery (order/membership/width hold) unchanged and still guards membership changes under the cursor - composerLiveActivity.test.mjs: six anchor-ordering tests (earliest first, append-on-later-start, channel scoping, unscoped earliest-across-channels, roster fallback, sub-second-shift stability); decay tests replaced with a headline-persists-regardless-of-age test - channels.spec.ts: retarget the two hover-freeze e2e tests from recency flips to membership changes — a third agent (lyra) starting a turn mid-hover appends only after the hold releases, and a turn completing mid-bar-hover exits only after release - e2eBridge.ts: __BUZZ_E2E_SEED_ACTIVE_TURNS__ accepts an explicit atMs so tests seed well-separated turn-start anchors deterministically - channels.spec.ts: seedPillActivityMessage now takes the matching turnId — the old hardcoded id resurrected a phantom sibling turn that would have kept a completed agent "working" forever - debugAgentHarness.ts / debug README: update decay-era comments to the hold-last-headline behavior Verified: 3652 unit tests pass; 12 pill/activity/typing e2e tests pass against a fresh build:e2e. Co-authored-by: Taylor Ho <taylorkmho@gmail.com> Signed-off-by: Taylor Ho <taylorkmho@gmail.com>

…pill styling Typing group becomes a slot sibling of the working-agent pills: - BotActivityBar.tsx: BotActivityComposerAction gains a `typingIndicator` prop rendered as the strip's trailing AnimatedPillSlot, so the typing group shares the scroller, edge fades, and layout/enter/exit animations with the pills; lone-item shrink logic now counts the typing slot - ChannelComposerActivityRow.tsx: the row renders ONE strip hosting both groups instead of a pill strip beside a standalone TypingIndicatorRow - ChannelPane.tsx / MessageThreadPanel.tsx: thread panel mirrors the same structure — ChannelPane builds the strip (thread typers included) and the panel's activity row just mounts it; `threadTypingPubkeys` prop removed from MessageThreadPanel; row height fixed at h-8.5 to match the channel row so the bottom-anchored composer never bumps - TypingIndicatorRow.tsx: drop the now-unused "activity" variant — the strip's slot owns sizing/spacing, so only the default variant remains - composer.css: corner-mask offset 2.5rem -> 2.625rem to match the fixed h-8.5 activity row below the composer in both surfaces - channels.spec.ts: new e2e covering the typing group rendering inside the strip, trailing the pills, and scrolling under the edge fades Align the "is working" pill with the "is typing" indicator: - Remove the pill's border, background, shadow, and horizontal padding — hover/open states signal through text color only - Match label typography (text-xs font-medium, was font-semibold) and the typing label's translate-y-px optical nudge; avatar-to-label gap-2 - Drop the labelClassName="font-semibold" overrides that compensated for the pill's old heavier weight (channel row + thread strip) Also document in AGENTS.md that e2e reruns need `pnpm run build:e2e` — a plain build omits the mock-bridge module and every spec fails at boot. Co-authored-by: Taylor Ho <taylorkmho@gmail.com> Signed-off-by: Taylor Ho <taylorkmho@gmail.com>

- Rewrite the tool branch of getActivityHeadline (agentSessionTranscriptPresentation.ts) to use the descriptor's terse action tier — verb + compact object, e.g. "Read foo.ts" — instead of "label · full preview" ("Read file · src/agents/ui/foo.ts"), so the composer pill's 200px cap shows the informative part of the action instead of ellipsizing a long preview - Basename path-like objects only (file-read / file-edit / skill-read); shell commands stay whole since they legitimately contain "/", and file edits reuse the already-basenamed fileEditSummary.filename - Fall back to the previous "label · preview" format when a descriptor carries no action (older descriptors) - Export the existing private basename() from agentSessionFileEditDiff.ts rather than adding a third copy - Document the terse format on deriveActivityPillLabel (composerLiveActivity.ts); no logic change — the pill picks it up via getActivityHeadline, whose only production consumer is the pill - Tests: update presentation expectations ("Send Message · abc" → "Sent abc"), add cases for file-read/file-edit basenaming, shell commands kept whole, and the no-action fallback; add a pill-level terse-headline case to composerLiveActivity.test.mjs Co-authored-by: Taylor Ho <taylorkmho@gmail.com> Signed-off-by: Taylor Ho <taylorkmho@gmail.com>

…er a resize The overflow-fade hook resize-observes the scroller and its content wrapper, but the wrapper was a min-w-0 flex item: under a narrow container it collapsed to the scroller's content width, so the shrink-0 pill slots overflowed it invisibly. When a pill's deferred label ticker swapped in a longer label AFTER the resize settled, scrollWidth grew without resizing any observed element — no ResizeObserver callback, and the edge fades stayed stale (missing) until a manual scroll. Caught by the "narrow strip scrolls horizontally with edge fades" e2e spec, which failed deterministically because label swaps are intentionally deferred until slot layout settles. - BotActivityBar.tsx: give the scroller's content wrapper min-w-max on a multi-item strip so its border box always tracks content size and every late growth fires the ResizeObserver; keep min-w-0 for the lone-item case so a single pill/typing group still shrinks to fit (shrinkToFit) instead of overflowing into scroll - Side effect: pills no longer visually compress below their natural width inside a constrained strip (the collapsed wrapper was squeezing them); they keep readable widths and the strip scrolls as designed - Document the min-w-max dependency at the ResizeObserver in useStripOverflowFades so the wrapper's sizing isn't "simplified" back into a stale-fade regression Verified: all 13 activity/pill/typing specs in channels.spec.ts pass (including the previously failing narrow-strip fade spec and the new typing-inside-strip spec), plus both channel-composer-overflow specs. Co-authored-by: Taylor Ho <taylorkmho@gmail.com> Signed-off-by: Taylor Ho <taylorkmho@gmail.com>

- Tighten avatar-to-label gap inside each working-agent pill (gap-2 -> gap-1.5) - Widen the gap between strip items (pills + typing indicator) for clearer separation (gap-1.5 -> gap-3) Co-authored-by: Taylor Ho <taylorkmho@gmail.com> Signed-off-by: Taylor Ho <taylorkmho@gmail.com>

Replace the all-or-nothing hover freeze in the composer activity bar with a guard that only pins pill widths when a resize would actually move the open hover card. - BotActivityBar.tsx: drop the blanket pinWidth/freezeLayout tied to bar hover; compute activeCardIndex (pill anchoring the open card) and pin width / freeze slot layout only for pills at or left of that index. The card renders side="top" align="start" — anchored to its pill's left edge — so only those pills can displace it by resizing - Pills right of the anchor, and every pill when no card is open (even with the bar hovered), now resize freely with their label swaps and keep slot layout animation so neighbors ease instead of snapping - Keep the membership/order freeze on bar hover unchanged — a pill exiting mid-hover would slide the strip under the cursor, which is independent of card placement - Expose the membership hold via a data-hold attribute on the strip root, since the inline width pin is no longer a proxy for it - channels.spec.ts: bar-hover test now waits on data-hold, asserts pills are NOT width-pinned during bar-only hover, and parks the cursor past the last pill (label swaps can legitimately grow a pill into the inter-pill gap); add "open card pins only its anchor pill and the pills left of it" covering both directions; add waitForSettledPillBoxes helper because pills mount with short generic labels and grow via the slot layout spring when seeded headlines land Co-authored-by: Taylor Ho <taylorkmho@gmail.com> Signed-off-by: Taylor Ho <taylorkmho@gmail.com>

…ent types An observer-backed agent that started typing its reply mid-turn had the typing signal swallowed entirely: computeAgentWorkingState drops a channel's typing entry under observer precedence, so the pill kept showing the stale last tool action and typing could only ever surface as a separate item in the trailing typing group. Now the existing pill's ticker swaps to "<name> is typing…" in the same slot and swaps back to the last action headline when typing clears. - desktop/src/features/agents/agentWorkingSignal.ts: add getAgentChannelTypingSince(pubkey, channelId) — a raw typing-registry read that deliberately bypasses the observer-precedence fold, returning the first-seen typing timestamp or null - desktop/src/features/channels/ui/BotActivityBar.tsx: BotActivityAgentPill subscribes via useSyncExternalStore; while typing, the ticker keys on a dedicated TYPING_LABEL_ID and the label becomes "<name> is typing…" — same slot, avatar, and hover feed, no new strip item. Partition unchanged: typing-only agents still divert to the combined typing indicator group - desktop/src/features/agents/agentWorkingSignal.test.mjs: three new tests pinning the getter (null cases, first-seen anchor lifecycle, and not-folded-under-observer-precedence) Co-authored-by: Taylor Ho <taylorkmho@gmail.com> Signed-off-by: Taylor Ho <taylorkmho@gmail.com>

The activity pill slot's single top-level 0.9s transition (PILL_REORDER_DURATION_S) applied to every animated value, so the enter/exit fade+scale inherited the slow spring meant only for reorder travel — pills faded/scaled in and out over 0.9s. - Split AnimatedPillSlot's transition per value: `layout` keeps the 0.9s reorder spring unchanged - `opacity` keeps the 0.9s linear tween only while the slot is moving (the mid-move dip keyframes must still land with the layout spring); otherwise it uses a fast 0.18s ease-out for enter/exit - `scale` always uses the fast tween — it only animates on enter/exit - Add PILL_ENTER_EXIT_DURATION_S (0.18s) alongside the reorder constant Co-authored-by: Taylor Ho <taylorkmho@gmail.com> Signed-off-by: Taylor Ho <taylorkmho@gmail.com>

…he turn-end gap The composer strip's pill-vs-typing-group partition keyed on signal source: any typing-fallback agent went to the merged typing group. An agent whose observer turn just completed but who was still typing therefore flipped partitions — its pill exited and a new typing-group item entered at the trailing slot — and re-typing after a finished turn mounted a group item instead of relighting the pill. Partition on capability instead: an agent renders as a pill when there is a session worth hovering and opening — an active observer turn, or a headline-able transcript for the channel left behind by a prior turn. Only an agent's first-ever activity in a channel can now start in the typing group; every later working↔typing transition is an in-place pill relabel (the "is typing…" override from cf6014de9). - desktop/src/features/channels/ui/composerLiveActivity.ts: add pure partitionComposerWorkingAgents helper (injected getWorkingSource / getTranscript readers, mirrors deriveAgentWorkingOrder's style); pill-worthiness = source !== "typing" OR deriveActivityPillLabel non-null, so lifecycle-noise-only transcripts ("Turn started" seeds) still fold into the group - desktop/src/features/channels/ui/ChannelComposerActivityRow.tsx: partition snapshot now subscribes to BOTH the working signal and the observer store (a transcript landing must be able to promote a typing agent); rename observerWorkingPubkeys → pillBotPubkeys to match the capability semantics - desktop/src/features/channels/ui/composerLiveActivity.test.mjs: six new tests — observer always pills, transcript-less typing groups, turn-end gap keeps the pill, lifecycle-noise-only transcripts group, channel scoping, mixed-roster order preservation - desktop/src/features/channels/ui/BotActivityBar.tsx + desktop/src/features/agents/debug/README.md: docs updated to the capability partition E2E: shows-and-clears, composer-does-not-shift, typing-group-in-strip, typing-avatars, and the pill hover-freeze suite all pass (8/8 smoke). Co-authored-by: Taylor Ho <taylorkmho@gmail.com> Signed-off-by: Taylor Ho <taylorkmho@gmail.com>

…tition flips The one strip transition that can't be an in-place relabel — an agent's first promotion from the merged typing group into a status pill — played as exit-here/enter-there: the avatar dropped out of the overlapping group while a new pill faded in beside it. Give both avatar homes a matching motion layoutId so the avatar MORPHS from the group into the new pill (geometry keeps the hop short: a new pill appends rightmost, directly adjacent to the trailing typing slot). - desktop/src/features/channels/ui/composerStripAvatarLayout.ts: new leaf module — ComposerStripAvatarScopeContext (per-strip namespace), useComposerStripAvatarLayoutId, and the shared morph spring. layoutIds are app-global and the channel strip + thread panel strip can be mounted at once, so ids bake in a per-strip scope string. Motion's own LayoutGroup id namespacing is deliberately NOT used: LayoutGroup re-measures every layout-animating member whenever any member updates, which turned each pill label ticker resize into a group-wide onLayoutAnimationStart storm that permanently held the pills' deferred label swaps (caught by the hover-freeze e2e test) - desktop/src/features/channels/ui/BotActivityBar.tsx: strip provides the scope via React.useId(); the pill avatar is wrapped in a motion.div carrying the shared-element id (dropped under reduced motion) - desktop/src/features/messages/ui/TypingIndicatorRow.tsx: avatar extracted into a TypingAvatar sub-component that reads the scope from context — no new props, and typing rows rendered outside a strip (context null) are unaffected - ChannelComposerActivityRow.tsx / ChannelPane.tsx: no call-site wiring needed beyond the strip itself (context flows through the typingIndicator slot) E2E: full pill/typing strip set passes (10/10 smoke), including the hover-freeze membership test that failed under the LayoutGroup approach. Co-authored-by: Taylor Ho <taylorkmho@gmail.com> Signed-off-by: Taylor Ho <taylorkmho@gmail.com>

…pill - Normalize plan items in getActivityHeadline (agentSessionTranscriptPresentation.ts): the fallthrough previously returned the raw item title, so ACP plan updates headlined the pill as a bare "Plan" / "Plan updated" next to the past-tense tool verbs ("Read foo.ts", "Ran …") — now "Created plan" for the initial plan and "Updated plan" for update markers (keyed off isUpdate) - Normalize thought items the same way: "Thinking" → "Thought", and the plan-titled thought that rendered "Planning" → "Planned" - Assistant-message headlines (first line of the streamed reply) are deliberately untouched — they are content, not action labels - Add test coverage for all four normalized cases Co-authored-by: Taylor Ho <taylorkmho@gmail.com> Signed-off-by: Taylor Ho <taylorkmho@gmail.com>

…runcating at the strip cap - BotActivityBar.tsx: apply the typing slot's max-w-64 cap only when the group shares the strip with working-agent pills. The cap exists so a long "X, Y, and N more are typing" label can't inflate the strip's scroll extent alongside pills, but it was unconditional — as the strip's LONE item a two-name label ("Alpha Debug and Beta Debug are typing...") got cut off at 256px even with the row mostly empty. The lone item already shrinks with the container (min-w-0 through the slot chain), so it now consumes the row's free width and only ellipsizes when the container is genuinely narrow. - channels.spec.ts: add "lone typing group uses the full row width" e2e regression — three typers push the label past the old cap, then asserts no truncation at full width (scrollWidth <= clientWidth) and graceful ellipsizing without scroll fades at a 200px row. Verified the test fails against the old unconditional cap. Co-authored-by: Taylor Ho <taylorkmho@gmail.com> Signed-off-by: Taylor Ho <taylorkmho@gmail.com>

…rom #3151 Post-rebase integration fixes after rebasing onto main, which landed the composer dock geometry contract (PR #3151) in the same region this branch reworks. The rebase kept main's dock architecture (reserved bottom rail + ComposerActivityAccessory fade) with the branch's pill strip rendered inside it; this commit cleans up the fallout: - ChannelPane.tsx: re-add the useChannelWorkingAgentPubkeys import — the dock's reserved-rail toggle (composer-dock--with-activity) still needs the channel-level working-set check even though ChannelComposerActivityRow computes its own copy — and consolidate the gating into a single hasComposerBottomActivity expression - ChannelComposerActivityAccessory.tsx: delete — main's channel-level wrapper from #3151 is fully superseded by ChannelComposerActivityRow rendered inside ComposerActivityAccessory - AppShell.tsx / routes/root.tsx: move the temporary DebugHarnessMount from AppShell (999/1000 lines on main, so the mount no longer fits the file-size ratchet) to the root route via a RootComponent wrapper - agents/debug/README.md + DebugHarnessMount.tsx: update the removal instructions and header comment for the new mount location Validated with just desktop-check, 3,817 desktop unit tests, and the channels / composer-overflow / threadpane-ultrawide e2e specs (88 passing). Co-authored-by: Taylor Ho <taylorkmho@gmail.com> Signed-off-by: Taylor Ho <taylorkmho@gmail.com>

Render the existing card-mint status chip inside the unified composer activity row so minting, ready, and failure states remain visible alongside live agent pills and typing. Co-authored-by: Taylor Ho <taylorkmho@gmail.com> Signed-off-by: Taylor Ho <taylorkmho@gmail.com>

Wait until the focus-thread body has a real middle-scroll range and a visible non-root anchor before switching layouts. This removes the suite-order race that left the captured anchor outside the split viewport. Co-authored-by: Taylor Ho <taylorkmho@gmail.com> Signed-off-by: Taylor Ho <taylorkmho@gmail.com>

Keep first-time thread-only agent typers in the combined typing group until channel-scoped observer activity provides a real session to preview. Preserve the truthful typing label after promotion and cover the full group-to-pill transition. Co-authored-by: Taylor Ho <taylorkmho@gmail.com> Signed-off-by: Taylor Ho <taylorkmho@gmail.com>

tellaho requested a review from a team as a code owner July 23, 2026 23:16

eastriverlee mentioned this pull request Jul 24, 2026

Shared relay agents: let the requester observe their own turn's activity (decouple observability from NIP-OA ownership) #2716

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tellaho marked this pull request as draft July 27, 2026 02:14

tellaho force-pushed the tho/composer-live-activity-resurrection branch from c3079e0 to 538223d Compare July 27, 2026 07:06

tellaho changed the title ~~add selected-agent live activity to the composer~~ show live agent activity in composer status pills Jul 27, 2026

tellaho changed the title ~~show live agent activity in composer status pills~~ surface live agent activity in composer status pills Jul 27, 2026

tellaho marked this pull request as ready for review July 27, 2026 09:21

tellaho marked this pull request as draft July 27, 2026 16:42

joelbrilliant mentioned this pull request Aug 1, 2026

Fleet view: show live agent activity across channels and mobile #4169

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tellaho force-pushed the tho/composer-live-activity-resurrection branch from 6b3dfff to 1d4356b Compare August 2, 2026 04:30

tellaho changed the title ~~surface live agent activity in composer status pills~~ feat(composer): surface live agent activity in status pills Aug 2, 2026

joelbrilliant mentioned this pull request Aug 3, 2026

feat(desktop): per-agent age and activity headline in channel popover #4583

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tellaho force-pushed the tho/composer-live-activity-resurrection branch 2 times, most recently from eadac0e to dc3a698 Compare August 5, 2026 05:41

tellaho added 16 commits August 5, 2026 16:41

tellaho added 12 commits August 5, 2026 16:42

tellaho force-pushed the tho/composer-live-activity-resurrection branch from dc3a698 to cb8118e Compare August 5, 2026 23:53

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feat(composer): surface live agent activity in status pills - #2646

feat(composer): surface live agent activity in status pills#2646
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tellaho commented Jul 23, 2026 •

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