# Schedules, reports and the sidebar's sections

Split out of `CLAUDE.md` -- same document, same rules, kept here because that
file is loaded in full on every session and this part is only wanted when you
are working on work that happens because time passed. Read it before you do.

Covers `services/schedule/`, `services/schedules.py`, `services/wake.py`,
`services/reports.py`, and how a third `Chat.kind` narrows the sidebar.

**A schedule is claimed before it is fired, and that order is the design.**
`ticker.sweep` moves the row on -- `fired_count`, `last_fire_at`, the next
`next_fire_at` -- and **commits** before a single firing is awaited. The other
order is a hot loop: a firing that raises is retried every tick for ever against
whatever it was that failed, and the only symptom is load. A sweep lock stops two
overlapping passes claiming the same row, because a firing awaits a model and can
take minutes. Exhaustion *disables*: a rule with nothing left returns `None` and
the row is switched off rather than examined for ever.

The blanket `except` around the loop is copied from `terminal._reaper_loop` for a
sharper reason than the reaper has. **A ticker that dies on one bad row stops
every schedule on the instance and says nothing** -- no request fails, no reply
errors, no dot appears. The reports simply stop.

**`rule.py` is pure, total and tested before anything calls it.** No session, no
wall clock, nothing that raises. `validate` is this feature's `nh3.clean`: the
compile step's output is *model output that becomes a timer*, so it clamps what
it recognises, drops what it does not, and answers `{}` for prose -- at which
point the route shows the manual form rather than writing a schedule that can
never fire. The invariant, pinned in the tests, is that **anything `validate`
accepts has a computable next occurrence**; a schedule that can never fire looks
exactly like a working one on every screen it appears on.

Wall-clock and elapsed time are deliberately different. `at.times` are wall-clock
in the owner's zone, so 15:00 stays 15:00 across a daylight-saving change --
that is what "every Monday at 3PM" means. `every` is elapsed real time, so six
hours stays six hours across a 23- or 25-hour day -- that is what a timer means.
Conflating them gets one of the two wrong twice a year. A time inside the
spring-forward gap fires at the first minute that exists rather than being
skipped, because a daily report vanishing once a year on a machine nobody watches
is exactly the failure this file is arranged around; `zoneinfo`'s own resolution
yields an instant an hour away wearing a wall-clock time that did not happen.

**`services/wake.py` is one lock discipline with two callers.** A finished
background job and a due schedule are the same problem -- put a turn into a chat
from outside any request and get it answered -- and both depend on there being no
`await` between the `running_for` check and the writes. Two lock dictionaries for
one invariant is how one of them drifts, so `jobs.wake` is now a caller that
supplies wording. `_completion_text` stayed where it was, because
`tool.background` quotes its opening sentence to the model.

**Three rules around firing each look like a bug from outside.** A firing
arriving while the chat still answers the previous one *queues* rather than
starting a second reply -- but `_drain` takes one per reply, so the queue is
bounded and past `max_queued` the firing is skipped with the reason on the row.
**Run now does not advance `next_fire_at`**, or testing a schedule would silently
consume the run it was testing. **Resuming recomputes from now**, or a schedule
paused for a month fires the instant it comes back, once for every occurrence it
missed.

**A task chat is created with its schedule, and that is the one place "chats are
created lazily" is bent.** The lazy rule exists so an opened-and-abandoned chat
never appears in the sidebar; a task chat is not opened and abandoned, because
creating it *is* the act -- and it has to exist before a first firing that may be
days away with nobody present to make one. Removing a schedule keeps the chat by
default and turns it back into an ordinary one: deleting a transcript as a side
effect of removing a timer is the destructive default this codebase avoids, and a
`KIND_TASK` chat with no schedule behind it would appear in no list at all.

**A task chat may not be an agent chat, in v1.** Scheduling one means running
commands on a timer with nobody watching -- and since Manual, Edit and Plan all
stop to ask on `RISK_EXECUTE`, the only two outcomes are unattended execution and
a reply that stalls until `approval_timeout`. Neither is a feature. That deserves
its own pass with a mode built for it.

**A task chat has no composer, and the suppression is by absence.**
`chat/index.html` includes `schedules/_strip.html` instead. `chat/_composer.html`
is the only thing that posts a message, so its absence *is* the guarantee -- a
hidden one would still be a form anybody could post to, the same reason Reports
has no route that would accept one.

**An empty `kind` means both sides of the switch, and never "no filter".** For
as long as there were exactly two kinds those were the same sentence, and the
sidebar leant on it: `Folder.visible_chats` read `not kind or chat.kind == kind`
and `sidebar_context` added its `where` only when `kind` was truthy. `kind` is
`""` precisely when the Chat/Agent switch is *absent* — an instance with agent
chats turned off — so the moment a third kind existed, every conversation
belonging to a section rather than to the tree appeared in somebody's ordinary
chat list, on exactly the instances whose owners would never think to look.

So `KINDS` stays the two-sided switch and `ALL_KINDS` is what a row may be.
**`KINDS` must not grow**: `api/preferences.py:set_sidebar_kind` validates
against it, and a third entry there makes the tree filterable to a side with no
button to leave it — the "one side of a fork nobody can move" failure the
`sidebar_split` guard already exists to prevent. Both narrowings filter against
`KINDS`, and both are pinned in `tests/test_sidebar_sections.py`, because they
are two implementations of one rule and only one of them is SQL: fixing the
query alone leaves a task chat filed in a folder showing up anyway.

`/api/chats/unread` narrows the same way and for a sharper reason — a section
gets **one dot for the section**, not one per conversation inside it, so forty
task chats must not mean forty out-of-band spans aimed at elements that are not
on the page. htmx says nothing at all when an OOB target is missing, so that
would be silent waste rather than a visible bug.

**A report is not a chat with one message in it.** It has a title, a body, a
time and a source; it is read top to bottom and never answered; and it must be
writable with no chat behind it at all, being the fallback destination for
scheduled work whose own chat has gone. As a `Chat` it would need a sidebar row
per daily report, a `title_generated` flag, an `unread` flag, a composer to
suppress and a bubble with an avatar and a rewind button around something that
is not a turn. It is the line `services/library/` already draws from the other
side, and `services/reports.py` is deliberately thinner than the library stores:
no sharing (a report records what somebody's own model did for them) and no
revisions (it describes a moment, not a document being worked on).

The section's character is enforced by absence rather than by suppression:
`reports/*.html` never includes the composer and never renders
`chat/_message.html`, so there is no `sse-connect` anywhere on those pages and
nothing on them *can* start a generation. `tests/test_reports.py` asserts both
the markup and, from the OpenAPI schema, that no route under `/reports` or
`/api/reports` accepts anything but the delete. Read the schema and not
`app.routes` — this FastAPI keeps an included router wrapped rather than
flattening it, so walking the routes finds nothing and the assertion passes for
the wrong reason.

**The sidebar shows one kind at a time.** `Chat.kind` distinguishes an agent
chat everywhere except the one place a person looked. The switch is stored on
the account, and three things about it are not the obvious version. It lives
*inside* the fragment it swaps, or the two buttons would go on showing the side
you had just left — and "New chat", which sits *above* the scroll area rather
than in the tree, comes along out of band
(`partials/_sidebar_actions.html`, rendered with `oob` only by the fragment
route). That one shipped broken: the button went on saying "New chat" over a
list of agent chats. Whether it *worked* was never the question — it said one
thing and did another, which is the shape of failure the switch itself was
arranged to avoid. `Folder.shown_in` hides a folder the filter emptied and keeps
one that was empty to begin with — the second is a container somebody just made,
and hiding it means it can never be found again, let alone filed into. And with
agent chats switched off there is no switch and no filtering at all, rather than
one side of a fork nobody can move: an administrator turning the feature off
would otherwise strand whoever last left it on Agents in an empty sidebar.