Both of the dashboard's periodic reads hit endpoints that are far more
expensive than their cadence assumed, and the cost lands on the SERVER's
event loop, so it is paid by every browser client too.
`GET /api/sessions/unified` is ~550ms against 11 live sessions: it scans
every Claude transcript plus the lifecycle log, uncached, and republishes
the search index. `scheduleRefresh()` was a 250ms trailing debounce with no
floor, and a queued refresh re-ran the instant the previous one returned
(by recursing, which also chained one pending promise per iteration), so a
stream of events paced the refetches at the endpoint's own latency: with
`session:updated` broadcast per session per 500ms while anything is
working, the scans ran back to back. `resyncDelayMs()` now keeps ambient
refetches 3s apart, measured start-to-start. The user's own actions call
`refresh()` directly and are unaffected, so what this paces is only
"notice what changed elsewhere".
`GET /api/sessions/:id/terminal` is ~80-100ms: two `execSync` tmux calls,
then the whole byte buffer normalized before the tail is taken. It was
polled every second for as long as a live row was selected. It now backs
off 1s, 2s, 4s, 5s while consecutive reads change nothing, and resets to 1s
on any change, when the selection moves, when this dashboard sends input or
answers a dialog, and on return from an attach. A pane that is printing is
still read every second; a pane at its composer is not.
The poll also kept running in three places it had nothing to draw for: the
whole time the user was attached in tmux (an attach can last hours), and
behind the message overlays that an async action opens (answered, killed,
started), which are not keystroke-driven and so never reached the
`afterInput()` path that stops it. `setInterval` becomes a chained
`setTimeout`, since the delay now varies.
Measured against the live server, same idle row selected, 25s window:
22 tail reads before, 5 after. With a working pane selected it stays at 22,
which is the intended cadence for a pane whose output you are watching.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
`TuiSessionRow` declared `lastSubmitAt`/`inputTokens`/`outputTokens`,
`stateSince()` ordered the WORKING group by the first of them and
`renderRowLines()` painted the other two, but nothing ever filled any of
them in: the unified list carries none, and the `session:updated` payload
that does was discarded (an event only schedules a refetch).
So a running turn was dated by its SESSION's creation instead. Measured
against the live server before the fix: w65 (created 21h ago, turn started
one minute earlier) outranked w67 (created 15 minutes ago, turn started
five minutes earlier), the reverse of the rule docs/tui.md states, and the
elapsed column read `21h` for a turn a minute old. The token column was
unreachable code for the same reason.
`fetchLiveSessionMetrics()` reads the three fields from `GET /api/sessions`
and `applyLiveMetrics()` folds them onto the rows. That route answers from
the server's cached LIGHT state (no terminal buffers): 10-20ms measured,
against the ~550ms the unified list in the same `Promise.all` already
costs, so it is cheap enough to ride every refresh. It is best-effort like
the approvals and tmux reads beside it, because losing the anchor is
better than losing the list.
A ZERO is treated as unknown rather than merged: `stateSince()` reads
`lastSubmitAt ?? createdAt` and 0 is not nullish, so a merged 0 would date
every never-submitted session to the epoch.
The snapshot path gets the same merge, or `codeman tui --list` would number
the WORKING group differently from the dashboard that `codeman tui <n>`
indexes into.
Verified live: working rows now show 28m/8m (turn age, tokens 280.5k/65.2k)
where they showed 21h/34m and no tokens. The e2e assertion fails on master's
wiring with `[*] 10m` against a session that pressed Enter one minute ago.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
The dashboard stops being read-only. The selected session's tail is polled
once a second while the plain list has focus and the layout is wide, and an
unchanged tail never reaches the model, so a quiet session costs no repaint.
A row with no live buffer says so instead of polling forever.
Keys: y/n and the parsed digits answer the selected session's dialog through
`POST /api/approvals/:id/answer` (never a blind keystroke: that route
re-captures the pane and 409s when the dialog has moved on, which the TUI
reports as "no longer on screen"); `p` opens a one-line composer aimed at
the selected session; `/` searches with a 250ms debounce and Enter switches
to a live session result; `g` shows the away digest. A new prompt rings the
bell exactly once, tracked by item id so a repaint or a refetch cannot
stutter, and the plan-usage chip rides `GET /api/status` plus its telemetry
event.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The IO half of src/tui: it owns the terminal, the timers, stdin and the
tmux handoff, and every decision it makes that is a function of its
inputs is an exported pure helper with unit tests (attach planning, the
typed kill confirmation, keymap selection, the repaint test, degraded
rows).
What it does: live session list over the unified API with SSE-driven
resync (debounced, with a 2s poll fallback the client asks for), cursor
and 1-9 navigation, attach and return, kill behind a typed confirmation
that refuses history rows and the session hosting the TUI, a new-session
case and CLI picker over quick-start, and degraded mode straight from
tmux when no server answers, re-probing so a server that starts upgrades
the dashboard in place.
Restoring the terminal is the part that has to be bulletproof: leave() is
idempotent and runs from normal quit, SIGINT/SIGTERM, a process exit hook
and prepended fatal handlers (src/index.ts already handles those by
exiting, so a listener registered after it would never run).
Attach is a handoff, never a proxy: the screen is restored and tmux gets
the real terminal. Inside tmux on the same socket there is nothing to
hand off to, so it issues switch-client and exits.
The preview pane, approvals answering, the prompt composer, search and
the digest are the next step; the region renders a placeholder rather
than pretending to load something.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Codeman maintainer