Sidebar dot + kanban badge locked to PR status — agent working/idle state invisible once PR exists

[i-trytoohard]

Bug

Once a session has an open PR, its sidebar dot and kanban badge are locked to the PR lifecycle color (blue/"pending") regardless of whether the agent is actively working or idle. Users lose the ability to see real-time activity state from the sidebar/kanban — the dot never shows "working" (orange) again.

Source: Discord — #🧑‍🔧-bug-triage | Reported by: @prateek | Analyzed against: cabf6610 (main, 2026-07-21)
Confidence: High

Screenshot

The gtm-strategy session is actively Working (orange pill in topbar, "Working — just now" in activity feed), but its sidebar dot is blue — indistinguishable from an idle session with an open PR.

Reproduction

1. Spawn a worker session and let it open a PR (status derives to pr_open or review_pending).
2. While the PR is open, send the agent another task or have it continue working (activity state → active).
3. Observe the sidebar dot: it stays blue (pending zone) even though the agent is actively working.
4. Compare with the topbar, which correctly shows orange "Working" (from session.activity.state, decoupled in PR fix: sync topbar activity pill #2541).
5. Same behavior on the kanban board — the card badge reflects PR status, not activity.

Root Cause

backend/internal/service/session/status.go, deriveStatus() checks for open PRs before checking agent activity:

// line 35-37: needs_input wins (correct)
if rec.Activity.State.NeedsInput() {
    return domain.StatusNeedsInput
}

// line 39-42: open-PR check runs FIRST — short-circuits activity
open := openPRs(prs)
if len(open) > 0 {
    return aggregatePRStatus(open)   // ← returns review_pending/pr_open/etc.
}

// line 47-49: activity check only reached if NO open PR
if rec.Activity.State == domain.ActivityActive {
    return domain.StatusWorking      // ← unreachable when a PR exists
}

Once openPRs() returns non-empty, deriveStatus() returns a PR-based status and never evaluates ActivityActive. So pr_open + active and pr_open + idle produce the same status — the sidebar dot and kanban badge are identical in both cases.

The frontend consumes this in two places, both reading only session.status (never activity.state):

• Sidebar (Sidebar.tsx:125-127): getSessionDotView(session) → getAttentionZoneView(session.status) → attentionZone() → blue "pending" dot for any PR-derived status
• Kanban (SessionsBoard.tsx:92, 467): column placement via attentionZone(session) + badge via getSessionStatusView(session.status)

The topbar was already fixed to read session.activity.state directly (PR #2541), so it correctly shows "Working" — but the sidebar and kanban were not decoupled, creating the disagreement visible in the screenshot.

Note: this is the inverse of #2345

#2345 describes the opposite symptom: the topbar showing "working" for idle+PR sessions. Both bugs stem from the same architectural tension — status and activity are derived independently, and different surfaces pick different signals — but the root causes are in different layers:

• Topbar status pill shows orange "working" for open PR and draft sessions, contradicting the board's "In review" description #2345: frontend workerDisplayStatus had no pr_open/draft case → fell through to "working"
• This bug: backend deriveStatus() returns PR-based status even when agent is active → sidebar/kanban can't show "working"

Fix

Move the ActivityActive check before the PR aggregation — same precedence that NeedsInput() already enjoys (line 35). In deriveStatus():

if rec.Activity.State.NeedsInput() {
    return domain.StatusNeedsInput
}
if rec.Activity.State == domain.ActivityActive {   // ← moved up
    return domain.StatusWorking
}

open := openPRs(prs)
if len(open) > 0 {
    return aggregatePRStatus(open)
}

Result: agent actively working → orange dot / "Working" column, regardless of PR. Agent goes idle → status falls back to PR lifecycle (blue review_pending, red ci_failed, green approved). The PR lifecycle remains visible in the right panel and board card PR groups — no information loss, just no longer competing with the real-time working signal.

Consistent with existing design: needs_input already takes precedence over PR status for the same reason — it's the signal that most needs the user's attention right now.

Impact

• Severity: Medium — no data loss, but the primary navigation surfaces (sidebar, kanban) lose a real-time signal users rely on to know which agents are actively working. This defeats the purpose of the multi-session dashboard.
• Scope: Every session that has an open PR and is still doing work (addressing reviews, fixing CI, iterating). With Claude Code's tool-use hooks keeping activity accurate, this is a large fraction of active sessions.
• Affected surfaces: Sidebar session dots, kanban board badge colors and column placement.

Related

• #2345 — inverse symptom (topbar shows "working" for idle+PR); same architectural tension, different layer
• #2728 — UI/UX Audit, AO-10 (P0): "Completion state is inconsistent across terminal, board, and session"
• #1985 — feat: simplify sidebar dot colors to 5-bucket scheme centered on human action
• PR fix: sync topbar activity pill #2541 — topbar decoupled to read session.activity.state directly (the half of this fix that already landed)