[Juliusolsson05]

Problem

Filling empty Grid Dispatch lanes needed a detour. With the focused lane empty and its row unbound, resolveDispatchSpawnTarget files a new agent under the classic Dispatch focus (the last agent you selected) or activeTabId. To put a Codex agent for project C into an empty lane you had to select some unrelated agent in C purely to move the target, come back to the lane, then run New Agent… — once per lane.

What this adds

New Agent In… (new-agent-in, Dispatch only). A two-step dialog:

1. Agent — Claude / Codex / OpenCode / OpenCode Terminal (the shared AGENT_PROVIDER_CHOICES).
2. Project — projects labelled A · title like the rest of Dispatch. Backspace goes back.

Committing calls the existing createDetachedDispatchAgent(selection, { tabId, anchorSessionId }) — the same explicit-project path the Dispatch project header's "+" and the external agents.create capability use. The agent fills the focused lane, exactly like New Agent….

Design decisions

• Dispatch only (surface: 'dispatch', also hidden under Tiled Tabs like New Agent…). In the grid a project is a tab one keystroke away and a detached agent spawned from the grid is not visible.
• Row bindings restrict the list. If the focused lane's row is bound to projects, only those are offered; otherwise every project. The bound-set lookup moved out of resolveDispatchSpawnTarget into focusedLaneBoundProjectTabIds, which both now read, so the picker and the resolver cannot disagree about what a row may hold. The resolver's behavior is unchanged; its bound-row rules are covered by the existing rowScopedRows.test.ts on the real persisted fixture (an earlier version of this PR wrongly said the branch was untested and duplicated those cases — removed in round 2).
• Initial highlight on the project step is the project plain New Agent… would have used, so Enter, Enter lands in the same project as today (the directory is deliberately that project's own checkout — see Anchor).
• Anchor (the session whose cwd the new agent borrows) is the project's first session with a directory, grid leaves before detached rows — the same order the header "+" uses, and it avoids borrowing a worktree agent's path. A project with no such session is listed disabled with the reason, not hidden; arrows skip it.
• A dedicated dialog on DialogContent (Escape, focus trap, outside-click and app input ownership come from the primitive). Not a fifth mode of NewAgentPlacementOverlay (already four intents; its "kind picked ⇒ placement step" invariant would need another branch) and not a palette sub-mode (a two-step flow would need its first answer in store state across palette modes).
• The dialog derives nothing while closed — the surface is always mounted and re-renders on every workspace change.
• No default keybinding.

Review round (independent code review before merge)

Verdict was "ready with fixes"; everything below is fixed on this branch (commits 2e793b57, 1b5bd639):

• Important — Enter on a focused footer button did the opposite of the button. The list's Enter handler called preventDefault (cancelling the focused button's native click) and then committed the highlighted row, so Tab → Cancel/Back → Enter spawned an agent. Footer buttons now own their Enter, per the rule components/ui/dialog-actions.tsx documents; rows keep highlight semantics. The dialog had copied this from ProviderSwitchPickerModal, where Tab → Cancel → Enter started a provider switch on main — filed as bug(ui): Switch Provider keyboard activation can commit a provider the user did not pick #862 and fixed here with a regression test.
• Held Enter (auto-repeat) is ignored, so one long press cannot pick the agent and commit the default project.
• One-shot state resets on close instead of open (no stale project step painted when something other than a user event opens the dialog).
• Removed a redundant cross-step focus effect — Radix FocusScope already refocuses the container when a focused row unmounts; the comment claiming otherwise was wrong.
• The empty project list now says the row's projects are closed and names Row Projects…. The root cause — closeTab never clears row bindings in memory, which also makes plain New Agent… fail silently with the overlay stuck — predates this PR and is filed as bug(dispatch): closing a project tab leaves grid rows bound to it, so New Agent silently does nothing #863 (not fixed here).
• Comment/plan accuracy: the header "+" anchor differs when its group's first row is pinned; Enter-Enter matches New Agent… at the project level, while the directory is deliberately the project's own checkout (removing focus from the decision is the point). Command notes now mention the project-scope switch.
• Kept as-is: row s in test titles is this repo's existing convention for avoiding apostrophes in single-quoted titles (e.g. rowScopedRows.test.ts).

Review round 2 (two orchestrated reviewers via the Agent Code orchestration MCP)

Reviewer A (Codex, adversarial behavior) and Reviewer B (Claude, integration/conventions/tests) both returned "ready with fixes". Fixed in 9e4414e3, c6f778fc, 01c0fb44, 599f7272:

• Important (A1 + B1) — Space activated the Tab-focused row, not the highlighted one, in this dialog and in Switch Provider on main: arrows moved the highlight while DOM focus stayed on a row, and Space is a native click on the focused button — no Enter handling can intercept it. Rows in both dialogs are no longer tab stops (tabIndex={-1}), so keyboard focus is only ever the dialog surface (arrows + Enter act on the highlight) or the footer (owns its own Enter/Space). bug(ui): Switch Provider keyboard activation can commit a provider the user did not pick #862 was widened to this path; structural regression tests in both dialogs (happy-dom cannot synthesize keyboard clicks).
• B2 — the focused-control Enter rule is now one exported predicate, focusedControlOwnsEnter in components/ui/dialog-actions.tsx, used by DialogActions (behavior unchanged, now pinned by a new dialog-actions.renderer.test.tsx) and both list dialogs, replacing a copied footer-slot guard. Three more pre-existing dialogs with the pattern — Agent View Mode, Reorder Tabs, Pin Agents — are filed as bug(ui): Enter on a focused Cancel applies the change in Agent View Mode, Reorder Tabs and Pin Agents #867, not fixed here.
• B3 — the reopen test could not fail, and this body claimed it did. Replaced by a test that watches the DOM during reopen (added and removed nodes) and fails if the stale project step mounts even for one render; verified red with reset-on-open, green with reset-on-close.
• B4 — duplicate resolver tests removed (see the design note above).
• B5–B9 — dialog keys declared in controlInteractions.ts; the disabled-row test asserts the native disabled attribute; eligibility is an explicit enabled discriminant on the project model (no longer re-derived from the anchor in three places); a stale 103 + 4 = 107 catalog comment fixed; the command description covers classic Dispatch rows as well as Grid lanes.

Linked issues

Fixes #852
Fixes #862
Refs #863, #867

Verification

Local, Node 24:

• npm run typecheck (control-sdk + workflow-mcp build + tsc -b on node and web) — exit 0 at every round, last at 599f7272.
• Round-1 regression tests (each failed first): footer Enter never advances/creates and leaves the native click un-prevented; held Enter ignored; closed-bound-row message; Switch Provider Cancel + Enter never switches (bug(ui): Switch Provider keyboard activation can commit a provider the user did not pick #862).
• Round-2 regression tests (each failed first): rows are not tab stops in both dialogs; model exposes enabled; the reopen DOM-watch test (red with reset-on-open, green with reset-on-close). DialogActions' pinned tests pass before and after the extraction (characterization).
• Final targeted run at 599f7272: renderer 27/27 (NewAgentInDialog, ProviderSwitchPickerModal, dialog-actions, dialog, control/documentation), unit 69/69 (newAgentInProjects, dispatchSelectors, rowScopedRows, catalog, featureReference).
• CI quality-gate and minimum-node-fixture-gate passed on the first two pushes; the round-2 push (599f7272) is gated the same way before merge. main gained fix(workspace): light the status header for terminal-view agent panes #853/fix(dispatch): give every Grid Dispatch lane its own selector strip #859 meanwhile — no file overlap, clean merge.
• npm run test:contract, npm run check:keybindings — pass.
• Targeted suites for everything touched — all pass: catalog.test.ts (snapshot 116 → 117, fails before the command exists), taxonomy.test.ts, featureReference.test.ts, dispatchSelectors.test.ts, newAgentInProjects.test.ts, NewAgentInDialog.renderer.test.tsx.

New tests:

• newAgentInProjects.test.ts — tab order + global letters, bound-row filtering, anchor order (grid leaf before detached worktree row; skips a leaf with no live session), disabled-with-reason, initial highlight = plain New Agent's target, fallback when that target is not offered or not anchorable.
• NewAgentInDialog.renderer.test.tsx — Enter-Enter lands in New Agent's target project; keyboard and mouse two-step commits pass {kind, providerRuntime} + {tabId, anchorSessionId}; OpenCode Terminal stays a distinct runtime; Backspace goes back without creating; disabled project can't be chosen by click or arrows; repeated Enter spawns once; Cancel never creates; nothing derived while closed.
• dispatchSelectors.test.ts — the new selector (the resolver's bound-row rules stay covered by rowScopedRows.test.ts, which guarded the extraction).
• dialog-actions.renderer.test.tsx — the shared focused-control Enter rule and DialogActions' confirm / Cancel-owns-Enter behavior.

Full local suite was not clean, for reasons unrelated to this diff (16 GB machine swapping with three other agent sessions running Vitest concurrently). Every failing file was checked against the base commit 48ea6912:

Failure	Evidence it is not this PR
store.test.ts "hydrates legacy standalone prompt templates…", store.performance.test.ts hook, lazy-prose renderer test — 5s/10s timeouts	Same branch commit passed all of them on one run and failed on the next; the store migration test also fails on the base commit.
imageAttachment.test.ts "every fixture is traceable to … a real session"	Asserts a session file under the developer's ~/.claude/projects/…klay/ that no longer exists on this machine; fails identically on the base commit.
dictation/historyStore.test.ts, control/history/tasks.test.ts	Only failed inside the contended full run (historyStore saw a growing count of foreign entries, consistent with a shared temp path colliding with the other sessions' runs); both pass on the base commit in isolation. Main-process code this PR does not touch.
controlHost.system.test.ts — 180s timeout	Timed out under the same contention; left to CI's clean runner.

CI's quality-gate is the authoritative run for this PR.

Limitations / follow-ups

• Not exercised in the running app (repo policy: no app launches from agent sessions). The behavior is covered by the unit + renderer tests above; a quick manual pass — Grid Dispatch → focus an empty lane → New Agent In… → pick agent + project — is worth doing before merge.
• In project-scope (non-global) Dispatch, choosing another project switches the active project, the same thing the header "+" does after a spawn. That is existing createDetachedDispatchAgent behavior, not changed here.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

https://claude.ai/code/session_01SVRSHn7c7qnBoUQo1e2X4k