Sidebar: let a thread report its own status (Needs you, Background, Done) with Stale after N hours

[idealsync-systems]

We run 20 to 30 Claude and Codex threads a day in T3 Code. The sidebar tells us whether a thread is running or finished, but not the thing we actually need when scanning it: can this thread be closed, or is it waiting on me? A thread shows "Completed" whether the work is truly done or it ended with a question.

What we do today

Every thread ends its turn with a short closing message. Its first line names one status, and its last line lists five checks:

**Status: Needs you** · Can be closed: No · Waiting on one login.
...
Checks: Goals 3/4 ✗ · Merged ✗ · Running ✓ · Issues ✓ · Ideas ✓

We then rebuild a board outside T3 that sorts threads by five statuses:

Status	Meaning
Stale	Needs you, and you haven't opened it for 2 hours (a setting)
Needs you	Only the user can move it: a question, decision, approval or access
Background	The turn ended, but something it started is still running (a job, a PR watch, a scheduled run)
Working	A turn is in progress
Done	Every check passes and nothing is running, so it can be closed

Sorted in that order, the threads that need you are always on top.

The ask

The smallest version that would let us move this board into the sidebar:

1. An agent-settable status per thread. An MCP tool (or a marker the server reads from the final message) that sets one of a small fixed set of statuses at the end of a turn.
2. T3's own facts override it. If a background task, watch or scheduled run that the thread started is still going, show Background even if the agent wrote Done. This stops agents marking themselves finished too early.
3. Stale computed by T3, never by the agent. Needs you plus not opened for N hours.
4. Sort or group the sidebar by that status.

Related

• Offering some improvements from my fork: sidebar sections, a Needs me list, less phone traffic, and more #30953 ("Needs me" list): similar goal, decided by a server classifier. This idea lets the agent say it explicitly, with T3's own running state as the safety net.
• Working overview page #29714 (Working overview page): a cross-thread view that could show the same statuses.

Happy to share our exact closing-message format and the rules we use to settle conflicts between the message and the running state.

[babs]

Same need here: about 20 unsettled threads at once, and a turn that ends on a plain-text ask ("awaiting your go-ahead", an option menu) looks just like one that is done. Today I work around it with a scheduled agent that reads every thread and marks the ones waiting on me as unread.

Points 1 and 2 are what matter to me. A smaller version that would already cover it:

• One flag, "needs you", with a short reason, set through t3_thread_organize by the thread's own agent or by a triage agent.
• It clears on the next message the user writes in the thread (wakes and agent messages don't count), or on an explicit dismiss.
• It is combined with what T3 already knows: pending approval, question, actionable plan. A live run still shows Working.
• A flagged thread never auto-settles.
• t3_thread_list gets a needsUser filter, so a triage agent reads one list instead of opening every thread.

No Stale and no separate Background/Done statuses: Background is the existing Waiting pill, and Done is just no flag. Thread rows are stored as JSON, so no migration is needed. #18386 (auto-mode denials ending as Completed) could set the same field from the server.

Happy to open a PR if the direction is approved.

Posted by Claude (Opus 5.5) through the Claude Code harness in T3 Code, at the user's request.