Starting a session from a Help Desk ticket

What it is

A support ticket is read and answered by a person, and some tickets describe a real defect — something you want an agent on, in the repo, with a worktree and the app's own rules. Retyping a customer's report into a blank session is the slow, lossy way to do that. These are the two doors that skip the retyping.

• The one you press. A Start session control sits on the open ticket, beside Mark resolved.
• The one that starts itself. A ticket that newly arrives in the waiting queue gets ONE read-only investigation of its own.

They share one prompt builder and one dialog, so a session started by either door opens on the same picture of the ticket.

Where to find it

• In the developer console — the full-screen Help Desk console draws the control in its top strip, on the row with the ticket's identity and Mark resolved.
• In the small widget and on a phone — the same control sits in the ticket's Back row, so it is reachable without expanding to full screen.
• The automatic half has no surface. It starts on arrival, puts a normal session on your board, and appears under Fix sessions with the other intake work. It is switched in Settings → Features as helpdeskTicketInvestigationEnabled, and it ships on.

How it behaves

You press Start session

• The shared start-session dialog opens already filled in: the ticket's subject, who opened it, how it arrived, and the conversation so far, oldest first. You can edit any of it before you start.
• A long ticket is capped and says so — you get the newest messages and an (earlier messages omitted) marker, never a wall of text and never an empty prompt.
• Confirming starts a real Claude Code session and does nothing else to the customer: no reply, no note, no notice. The control is inert until you confirm. It DOES record the session on the ticket, so you can get back to it.
• The way back is on the ticket. Once a ticket has a session working it — the one you started, or the one the app started by itself — the ticket shows Open session, which jumps straight to it. The Help Desk board shows the same link, because both read the same card.

A ticket arrives by itself

• The investigation reads the ticket and reports what it found and what it recommends, then waits for you. It is told it is read-only; that is its brief, exactly as the email-ticket lane's investigations are.
• One per ticket, ever. The claim is written before the session is created, so a redelivery, a restart replaying the queue, or a follow-up on the same ticket can never buy a second one.
• A daily ceiling bounds how many start, and a ticket that is skipped for any reason is named in the log — the ceiling, an already-claimed ticket, no claimable card, or no target project. A ticket that hits the ceiling is still startable by hand.
• A ticket whose investigation could not start is not lost. The claim is handed back when the start fails, and a start that was interrupted is released the next time the app starts, so the ticket stays startable.
• One switch turns it off without touching the button you press by hand.

What neither door does

• It never writes a reply, a draft, a private note, or a status change to the ticket.
• It never notifies, messages or answers the customer. An investigation's findings go to you; nothing reaches the person who wrote in.
• The control is never drawn on the customer's side of a conversation — it is gated on the console's own open-ticket state.

For agents

Both doors answer to one prompt builder and one contract, and the paths below are where the behaviour above is implemented.

The key files

• The prompt — helpdesk-ticket-session-prompt.ts
• The button and its dialog wiring — HelpdeskStartSessionControl.tsx
• The automatic door — helpdesk-ticket-investigation.ts, its ceiling in helpdesk-ticket-investigation-budget.ts, and its wiring in helpdesk-boot.ts
• The card it claims on the Tracker — queries-intake-rows.ts
• The rules both doors answer to — helpdesk-ticket-session-contract.md

Related

The wider Help Desk story — the queue, its status tabs, drafts and routing rules — is on Get Help (Helpdesk) part 2. How a ticket arrives by email in the first place is on Help Desk email tickets, and the console the Start session control is drawn on is on Help Desk.