Needs-you section highlight

What it is

Overseers and other chats often finish an update with the one or two things they cannot do without you: watch an export, approve a card, close an app, paste a key. Before this, that list looked like every other section of the reply and was easy to skim past, so the session sat waiting.

Now that section is framed in a neon box in the Omniscio logo colours (periwinkle, cyan and violet on dark themes; deeper versions of the same colours on light themes). A small frosted glass tab reading "Waiting on you" sits on the box's top edge. Everything else in the message looks exactly as before.

Where to find it

It appears wherever an agent's reply is drawn — the chat view of any session (overseer, crew member, ordinary chat) and the inbox card for that session — but only on the session's newest message.

With Plain Speak on, a finished message opens on its short summary card, which has no needs-you section of its own. The box is on the message as the agent wrote it: flip to the Original view (the ⇄ icon, or V) to see it.

Turning it off

Settings → Lab → "Needs You Section Highlight". It is on by default. With it off, every message is drawn exactly as it was before this existed: the heading and its list are still there, just without the box. You can also ask any agent to switch it off or on for you.

How it behaves

What gets the box

A section is boxed when its heading starts with one of the wordings agents already use. The list is fixed (agents are not asked to write anything new):

Kind of wording	Examples
Waiting / needs	"Needs you", "Needs you: one look", "Waiting on you", "Still waiting on you", "Blocked or needs you", "Needed from you", "Needs your approval"
What I need	"What I need from you", "Two things I need from you", "Decisions I need from you", "What you need to do", "What needs you", "What's left for you"
Your turn	"Your call", "Your move", "Your decision", "Action needed", "Action required", "Over to you", "Still on your side", "One click from you"

Leading emoji, numbering, bold and capital letters don't matter ("⏳ WAITING ON YOU" counts). The box covers the heading and everything under it, up to the next heading of the same or bigger size, or a divider line.

A paragraph that starts with a bold label from that list, followed straight away by a bullet list, is boxed too — the label and its list together.

What never gets the box

• A section that says nothing is needed — a heading with "nothing", "none", "no action" or "not needed" in it ("Nothing needed from you"), or a section whose body is empty or just says "None" / "Nothing" / "N/A".
• Older messages. Only the newest message in a session is boxed. Once you reply, or the agent sends something newer, the box moves on or goes away.
• A reply still being written. The box appears once the message has finished arriving.
• Text from outside, such as a plugin's README or another document shown in the app, so outside text can never dress itself up as a request from your session.
• Question cards and approval cards. Those already have their own clickable look and are left alone.
• Ordinary sections like "What changed", "Next" or "What this means for you".

Worth knowing

• The words are never changed. The box is drawing only: copying, searching or exporting the message gives exactly what the agent wrote, and the tab text is not picked up when you select and copy.
• Screen readers hear the box as a region named "Waiting on you"; the tab itself is not read out twice.
• The tab is translated into every language the app supports.
• Calm by design. The box never animates. In low-power mode the tab's glass blur is dropped and the tinted tab remains.
• A new wording isn't boxed until it is added to the list. If an agent writes a heading that isn't on the list, that section simply looks like any other.
• An extremely long message can leave it plain. Past the app's length limit the rest of a message is shown as plain text to keep the app responsive, so a needs-you section that starts beyond that point gets no box.
• It went missing for a few days. It first shipped on 22 October 2026 but only on one computer's local copy, and a catch-up to GitHub on 23 October removed it. It was rebuilt on GitHub's master on 27 October 2026.

For agents

• The switch is the needsYouSectionEnabled setting (on by default); flip it for the user over the command line with PATCH /settings/needsYouSectionEnabled.
• The fixed wording list and the "nothing needed" check live in src/shared/needs-you-section.ts.
• A rendering step, src/renderer/src/lib/rehype-needs-you-section.ts, finds each section and wraps it in an amc-needs-you element; NeedsYouSection (src/renderer/src/components/ui/agent-markdown-needs-you.tsx) draws the box and tab.
• The step only runs when the message renderer is told the message is live (needsYouLive on the prose block, set from isFinalMessage and not streaming), the text is trusted, and the Lab switch is on.
• The look is one pair of classes, .needs-you-neon and .needs-you-glass-tab, reading --needs-you-* colour tokens set once per theme in src/renderer/src/styles/globals.css.
• The rules are locked in .claude/memory/contracts/needs-you-section-highlight-contract.md.

Related

The other shapes an agent's reply can take — callouts, collapsible sections, key caps and pictures — are covered in Agent reply formatting and showing images. How a chat lays out its messages is in Agent message display. The clickable question cards, which this box deliberately leaves alone, are explained in Question widget.