Auto-open a session that needs you (idle sessions panel)

What it is

What it does

The embedded Sessions panels — the "Sessions" tab in Tasks, plus SMS, KMS, Mind Maps, Whiteboard, Flowchart, NightyTidy2, plugin panels, and a detached project window — all share one reusable sessions list. When you're looking at one of those panels with nothing selected (the pane reads "Pick a session to open its chat") and a session shows up in the amber "Needs You" group, Omniscio opens its chat for you automatically instead of leaving you staring at the empty pane.

So the moment something needs you, you're already in it — no extra click.

Where to find it

The auto-open belongs to the embedded, reusable Sessions panels listed above: the Sessions tab in Tasks, plus SMS, KMS, Mind Maps, Whiteboard, Flowchart, NightyTidy2, plugin panels, and a detached project window. Open one of those with nothing selected — the pane reads "Pick a session to open its chat" — and a session in the amber "Needs You" group opens its chat for you. It is desktop-only, so on a narrow screen the list stays put and you tap the row yourself, and the regular per-project sidebar down the left of the app is unchanged.

How it behaves

• Lands you in a waiting session on arrival. If you open the tab and something is already in "Needs You" — or a session drops into "Needs You" while you're sitting there idle — its chat opens on its own.
• Never interrupts you. It only ever acts when nothing is selected. If you're already reading a session's chat and another one starts needing you, you are not yanked away — you keep your place (the new one just waits in the amber list).
• Closing stays closed. If you close the chat with the X without answering, you land back on the empty "Pick a session" pane and it does not immediately re-open the same one. Only a session that newly arrives in "Needs You" gets auto-opened.
• Comes back if it comes back. If a session leaves "Needs You" (you answered it) and later needs you again, that counts as a fresh arrival and it opens again.
• Only opens what already exists. It reveals an existing session's chat — it never starts a new session, so it never costs tokens.

When it does NOT apply

• On your phone. It's desktop-only. On a narrow screen the sessions list fills the whole screen, so auto-opening would hide the list the instant you tapped the tab — you'd never see what's waiting. On mobile the list stays put and you tap the row yourself.
• When you already have a session open in that panel. It only fills an empty pane.
• When the only thing in "Needs You" is a notice, not a session — e.g. a project alert or an approval row. Those aren't sessions, so there's nothing to open; the amber section still shows them.
• The main project sidebar. This is about the embedded, reusable Sessions panels listed above. The regular per-project sidebar down the left of the app is unchanged.

The order it picks

If several sessions are waiting in "Needs You" at once, it opens the top one — the same top-to-bottom order you see in the amber list (oldest-waiting first). It reads that list from the exact same rule the section itself renders, so it can never open something that isn't the one shown at the top.

For agents

Where it lives in code

The auto-select is a small effect in the shared shell SessionHostSidebar.tsx: when activeId is null, it's a desktop screen, and a session has newly entered "Needs You" (tracked with a seen-set advanced every render), it calls the panel's own onSelect to open that session. The "who's in Needs You, and in what order" question is answered by one shared helper, needs-you-select.ts, which both the auto-select and the rendered SessionSectionList use — so the two can never disagree. The full set of invariants and the tests that lock them live in the contract: .claude/memory/contracts/session-host-contract.md (Invariant 12).

Related

• session-stuck-in-needs-you.md — the seven reasons a session ends up in "Needs You" in the first place.
• gray-session-triage.md · paused-session-triage.md — the sibling "auto-advance to the next one" behaviors when you act on a session (this feature is the "you haven't picked anything yet" case instead).
• tasks-v2.md — the Tasks outliner, whose "Sessions" tab is the panel in the reported case.