[JJLiebig]

Opening a Codex conversation in the web UI can repeatedly scroll the same idle desktop TUI, even while the phone's chat stays stable. The conversation resolver polls pane.read with source: recent and lines: 400; Herdr 0.9.3 can fulfill text reads by injecting mouse-wheel events to capture the agent's alternate-screen history.

Use Herdr's existing ANSI snapshot path for recent / recent_unwrapped text reads in the shared client, then strip terminal formatting with Node's standard library when requested, preserving raw escapes for an explicit stripAnsi: false. Return the requested text format and preserve response metadata. This covers both Codex rollout matching and fallback transcript polling; visible reads and explicit ANSI reads keep their current behavior.

Herdr's passive read intent is internal, so this uses the existing public API without a cross-repository change. Background reads retain stored terminal history but stop harvesting older history hidden inside the agent's own scroll UI.

Validation:

• Real isolated Windows Herdr 0.9.3 integration suite: 9 passed. The new alternate-screen TUI fixture recorded dozens of mouse-wheel events before the fix and zero input after it; plain text, unchanged viewport, and explicit ANSI formatting are checked.
• Existing Codex / conversation / fallback transcript tests: 81 passed.
• Typecheck, production build and generated-type freshness check passed.
• The same real-server client regression also passed on Linux under WSL (9 tests). The existing Linux Codex binding suite could not run there because Herdr intentionally omits supported agents' argv on WSL; upstream Ubuntu CI remains the binding-suite gate.
• Deep local Review Suite completed: paired initial review, four-reviewer Arena, scope/cleanup pass, and paired final signoff found no runtime defects. Rebased onto current main with a changelog-only conflict resolution; production and test blobs match the reviewed commit exactly. Ready for review after green local deep review, as requested by the contributor. Upstream CI still requires repository-admin approval of the fork workflows. Both workflows currently conclude action_required; approval attempts from the contributor account were denied with HTTP 403 (admin rights required). CI has not run.

No change to the mobile chat's scroll behavior or the running local installation.

Rabbit follow-up: preserve escape sequences when a caller explicitly sets stripAnsi: false. The existing real-server regression now checks this for both recent sources and still verifies zero injected input. The new assertion failed before the fix; all 9 integration tests and typecheck pass after it. This is a narrow formatting-option fix; no deep review was rerun, as requested.

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• CHANGELOG.md

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• CHANGELOG.md

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📝 Summary

Summary by CodeRabbit

• Bug Fixes
  • Refreshing a Codex conversation on a phone no longer scrolls the same idle agent’s desktop terminal. Refresh polling leaves the terminal’s visible text unchanged and does not send input.
  • Recent conversation text no longer displays terminal control characters when stripping is enabled. Text reads are returned in the requested text format, while ANSI-formatted reads retain control characters.

Walkthrough

Recent pane text reads now request ANSI output. When stripping is enabled, the client removes terminal control characters locally. A live-server test checks that polling preserves pane input and visible text.

Changes

Pane Read Formatting

Layer / File(s)	Summary
Recent text read handling server/herdr/client.ts, server/herdr/client.test.ts, CHANGELOG.md	Recent text reads request ANSI output, then strip terminal control characters when stripping is enabled. The live-server test checks polling behavior and ANSI output. The changelog records the fix.

Priority: ⬇️ Low

Estimated code review effort: 2 (Simple) | ~10 minutes

Change: Bug fix · Severity of issue fixed: Low

Merge Risk: ⚪ Minimal · up to 06329

The change is ready to merge after normal checks; no actionable risk remains from the reviewed change.

Architecture Summary

Architecture risk: 🔵 Low · up to e9f1f

The change affects 2 systems.

Changed systems: server, CHANGELOG.md

Architecture concerns
No architecture-level concerns identified.

Review details

Systems and components

• observed — server (service) was modified; 2 changed files map to changed impact.
• observed — CHANGELOG.md (service) was modified; 1 changed file maps to changed impact.

Before / after behavior

• observed — Modified behavior in server/herdr/client.test.ts: The test adds imports for temporary-file setup and workspace/pane operations. The introductory comment replaces the blanket read-only claim with a note that only the polling regression creates and writes a pane in its own workspace.
• observed — Modified behavior in server/herdr/client.test.ts: A live-server regression test creates a temporary workspace and alternate-screen TUI, waits up to five seconds for its saved text to appear, and marks the pane idle. It polls recent and recent_unwrapped twice each, checks saved text and link output with ANSI stripped, then verifies raw reads retain escapes and ANSI-format reads return escapes. It also checks that polling sends no input and leaves visible text unchanged. Workspace closure and temporary-directory removal run in finally.
• observed — Modified behavior in CHANGELOG.md: Adds an Unreleased fix note describing the phone conversation refresh no longer scrolling the same idle agent’s desktop terminal.
• observed — Modified behavior in server/herdr/client.ts: Adds the stripVTControlCharacters import from node:util.

🚥 Pre-merge checks | ✅ 4 | ❌ 1

❌ Failed checks (1 warning)

Check name	Status	Explanation	Resolution
Docstring Coverage	⚠️ Warning	Docstring coverage is 0.00% which is insufficient. The required threshold is 80.00%. Docstring coverage is scoped to functions touched by this diff. Analyzed 1 functions across 2 files. (1 skipped: 1 …	Write docstrings for the functions missing them to satisfy the coverage threshold.

✅ Passed checks (4 passed)

Check name	Status	Explanation
Title check	✅ Passed	The title clearly describes the primary change: preventing chat polling from scrolling the desktop Codex TUI.
Description check	✅ Passed	The description explains the problem, the behavior change, and the validation results, including that upstream CI has not run. It does not use the template’s exact “## Change” and “## Validation” head…
Linked Issues check	✅ Passed	Check skipped because no linked issues were found for this pull request.
Out of Scope Changes check	✅ Passed	Check skipped because no linked issues were found for this pull request.

Full details: Docstring Coverage

Explanation

Docstring coverage is 0.00% which is insufficient. The required threshold is 80.00%. Docstring coverage is scoped to functions touched by this diff. Analyzed 1 functions across 2 files. (1 skipped: 1 unsupported.)

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🤖 Prompt to fix review comments

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Inline comments:
Review comments at @server/herdr/client.ts:
- Around line 326-332: Update the passiveText return path in paneRead to strip
VT control characters only when strip is true; when strip is false, preserve the
raw text returned by herdr.

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📒 Files selected for processing (3)

• CHANGELOG.md
• server/herdr/client.test.ts
• server/herdr/client.ts

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