[shalinbtw]

The sidebar shows a lot more per thread than ChatGPT or Claude do. Each active, pinned or working row is a three-line card: project name and status, title, then branch, PR, diff and provider. You can only fit about half as many threads on screen, and it's hard to scan for the thing you actually care about (which thread needs me?).

This is a proposal, opened without a prior Ideas discussion, so happy for it to be closed or reworked if you'd rather go another way.

What changed

With the New design on (the default), card rows render as one line, matching the shelf rows:

• Left: the status icon (Working, Waiting, Approval, Input, Request, Limited, Failed, Done) in its colour, or the project favicon when there's no status
• Middle: the title, plus the existing draft, pin and terminal indicators
• Right: elapsed time while working or waiting, Woke, or time since the last message. On hover this swaps to Discard draft / Snooze / Settle (Settle is icon-only here to leave room for the title)

Project, machine, branch, model, handoffs, terminals, errors and PRs are still in the hover card. The +/− diff count is the one thing no longer shown in the sidebar. Unsent draft rows get the same one-line layout. The classic design is unchanged, and I removed the redesign: classes from the classic card path since it now only renders with the New design off.

The drag projection also assumed 82px cards when an empty Active or Pins target had nothing to measure, so dragging a settled thread into an empty section reserved an oversized slot. It now uses the slim height when cards are compact (compactCards), with a regression test in Sidebar.drag.test.ts.

Before / after

Same 13 threads, every row state. Statuses and titles were forced locally for the capture through a throwaway patch that isn't in this PR.

Hover keeps the controls and the details card:

Verification

• vp run check:changed: format, lint, knip and typecheck pass
• vp test run apps/web/src/components/Sidebar.drag.test.ts: 43 pass, including the new compact-card test (fails on main's 82px fallback, expects 36)
• Manually checked in vp run dev on a migrated copy of real data, dark mode, at 1280px: one-line rows, hover controls, hover card, draft row, Woke dismiss button
• Not checked: the browser test suites locally (no Playwright headless Chromium on this machine, CI runs them), light mode, the narrowest sidebar width with Woke + draft + pin + hover all on one row (that combination also clips on main's card header line), and mobile, which has its own navigation and isn't touched here

Subagent threads still have no sidebar row and still highlight their parent, since that logic in Sidebar.logic.ts is unchanged.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code (Claude Opus 5.5)

[t3-code-bot]

closing at @StiensWout's request under Establish the problem and scope first.

Reworks the default New-design sidebar into one-line rows, removes diff counts from the sidebar, and changes hover action presentation without prior Ideas approval. This intentionally changes the shipped presentation and information hierarchy rather than configuring it.

Agree on the compact sidebar direction and scope with maintainers in Ideas and link the approval; draft status does not postpone the requirement.

thanks for trying to help improve t3 code. if you think this closure was a mistake, please open a fresh pr addressing the requirement above, and link back to this one.