Problem

Clicking Orchestrator sometimes opened an empty conversation. History still lived on the live orchestrator; the UI had treated a stale empty workspace cache as “no orchestrator” and spawned a blank new one.

Fix

Shared openOrEnsureOrchestrator helper used by ShellTopbar, Sidebar, and CommandPalette:

1. Prefer newestActiveOrchestrator / findProjectOrchestrator from the current cache
2. If none → refetch workspaces once, recompute
3. If still none → spawnOrchestrator(..., clean=false) only
4. Never passes clean=true

Preserved

• Restart / settings / restore_dialog clean=true paths
• Kill / terminate / multi-project isolation / worker spawn
• Backend ensure semantics (unchanged)

Residual risk

• bug(lifecycle): orchestrator terminated mid-turn by a stale-activity/probe race, then silently replaced with no linkage or notification #2501 / fix(lifecycle): require consecutive dead probes before terminating a session #2587: false-terminated live orchestrator on the daemon still causes ensure to mint a new empty session. Not addressed here (lifecycle probe race).

Tests

cd frontend && npm test -- --run \
  src/renderer/lib/open-orchestrator.test.ts \
  src/renderer/lib/spawn-orchestrator.test.ts \
  src/renderer/components/CommandPalette.test.tsx \
  src/renderer/components/ShellTopbar.test.tsx