plat 413

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PLAT-413 — A coding agent's background tasks filled the chat with boxed cards of raw tool payload

Coordination	Value
State	fixed on main; deploy pending
Severity	P3 (noise; the chat was hard to read)
Date	2026-10-04
Owner	frontend-chat
Related	PLAT-402 (native tools always on, so Relays now run Muse's own shell tool)

Problem

In a Relay chat on Excellence a Muse run showed a column of cyan boxes: "Background task 01a1032e · started / status / output", each output box holding the whole tool payload as JSON (the full polling loop for i in $(seq 1 24); do ... sleep 10, chunk_id, work_id, ...). Muse runs its own shell tool in the background since native tools became always on; the lifecycle events themselves (coding_agent_background_task) were added on 2026-09-23.

Fix

summarizeBackgroundTaskMessage (frontend/src/utils/cleanConversation.ts) turns the message into one readable line: the task's own description when the payload is JSON that has one, else the first line, cut to 140 characters. The detailed event view (EventDispatcher) shows that line and keeps the full text behind "Show details" (capped at 6000 characters); the clean conversation view uses the same line. Short messages and bare lifecycle events look as before. Tests: EventDispatcher.backgroundTask.test.tsx, CleanConversationSurface.test.ts.

Left

• Deploy.
• Each poll still produces its own started/status/output rows; folding one task's rows into a single item was not done.