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DevLog #13: The Chat Opens a Window, Vim Gets Serious, and Conversations Outlive Machines

The center of gravity this week was continuity. Chats got harder to lose, easier to read, and much less likely to forget the plot when a connection hiccupped.

Conversations Outlive Their Machines

• A conversation now has a durable identity. Transcripts are no longer bound to one short-lived session. Resume a conversation on another machine, with another agent, or from another interface and its history follows.
• Dropped connections recover the same chat. If the web socket disappears, the chat reconnects to the existing run instead of quietly opening a blank one. Replies that finished while you were offline are restored without replaying your prompt.
• Reopening a live conversation goes live again. Refresh a web or CLI conversation that is still running and Nori reconnects in place, preserving the transcript and the address you bookmarked.
• Resume stopped eating its own homework. Synthetic resume context stays available to the agent but is no longer recursively recorded as if the user had typed it. History hydration, Slack catch-up, and transcript-powered features also learned to ignore adjacent metadata instead of trying to read it as conversation text.
• Browser terminals hold their claim. Reconnecting to an active browser terminal no longer risks handing the underlying session to somebody else, and a blank terminal reattach now repaints properly.

The Chat Opens a Window

• Live previews, inside the chat. When an agent starts a local web app, a new Preview button opens it in a responsive drawer beside the conversation. It can reload, open the page separately, and go full-screen on mobile.
• Pull requests become artifacts. GitHub PR links in an agent’s finished reply now appear as tidy chips and in the artifact pane, so the thing you asked for is easier to find than the sentence around it.
• Your history starts with yours. Conversation history now defaults to sessions you started, with an accessible Yours / All switch when you want the org-wide view. Pagination stays put as the layout changes.
• Finished work can tap you on the shoulder. Opt into a sound and system notification when a successful turn has been waiting for you for ten seconds. Activity cancels the alert, because nobody needs a robot shouting while they are already looking at it.

Streaming Gets Its Typography License

• Smoother words, live Markdown. Assistant text now arrives through an adaptive visual buffer instead of lurching in uneven chunks, and sanitized Markdown renders while the response is still streaming.
• The dots tell the truth. The activity indicator stays visible for the whole prompt turn, including tool work and streamed text, without long thinking traces pushing the page into a second scrollbar.
• Stale pages stop haunting the browser. The chat shell now revalidates itself while versioned assets remain cacheable, preventing old JavaScript and new CSS from meeting in the night and breaking the layout.

A Composer That Knows What Device It Is On

• Enter sends on desktop. On a laptop or desktop, plain Enter sends and the usual modifier combinations create newlines. Mobile and tablet keep the explicit Send button, where Enter still means a new line.
• Multiline prompts fold themselves away. Send a tall draft and the empty composer immediately collapses back to one line instead of preserving a prompt-shaped hole.
• The controls stay put. Status, Help, Admin, Done, and Send now share a pinned action footer that fits down to narrow mobile widths. Headers, history, settings, integrations, billing, setup, and skillset pages received the same responsive attention.
• Navigation preserves your work. New-chat and conversation-history links open in separate tabs, and onboarding redirects now stay out of settings and historical deep links.
• The activity heatmap moved in. Eight weeks of session activity now live in the sidebar, where it can quietly judge your streak without occupying the fleet dashboard.

Slack Learns Better Markdown and Better Manners

• Replies use Slack’s native Markdown blocks. Tables, lists, links, bold text, and cancelled replies now render through the modern path instead of being squeezed through the legacy formatter.
• Custom agents finish syncing before save completes. When workspace permissions allow it, a new named agent’s mention group is ready as soon as the settings screen returns. If permissions block it, the help points to the relevant Slack controls.
• Final replies contain the final answer. Slack and Discord agents now know that only their last reply block reaches the thread, reducing the charming but unhelpful habit of saying “as explained above” about text nobody else saw.
• Onboarding gets a finish line. Connecting Slack now waits for the reconnect and lands on a dedicated success page with the org’s Nori handle and a route back to orientation.

Integrations Stay on the Nori Side of the Fence

• Luma joins the library. Connect Luma from the integrations catalog and new sessions receive the expected command-line tool and configuration.
• Cursor can see Nori-managed MCP tools. Cursor sessions now receive the same centralized MCP setup as the other supported agents.
• Google Workspace credentials stay fresh. Refresh timing and concurrent updates were tightened so long-running sessions are less likely to meet an expired Google Workspace login mid-turn.
• One integration path, not two competing ones. Provider-native connectors are now disabled by default while Nori-managed MCP connections remain available across supported agents. Chat settings show what is actually connected rather than advertising catalog entries as though they were live.
• Long sessions keep registry access. The credential used by session-side skillset commands now refreshes on its own schedule instead of aging out while a session is still working.

Small Doors, Properly Hinged

• Old failures stop blocking new work. Ancient setup alerts no longer prevent a healthy environment from starting today.
• Temporary Admin mode is reliably temporary. The !admin window now expires cleanly after thirty minutes and keeps the right scope through credential refreshes.
• Session links arrive usable. Agents now resolve remote-session URLs before sharing them instead of handing users a shell variable dressed as a link.
• The old Toolshed provisioning path is gone. The legacy feature and its settings were removed, shrinking the number of ways an environment can be assembled.

Vim Mode Gets Serious

• More of the language. Vim editing now includes a broader set of operators, text objects, motions, and proper linewise pasting, with follow-up fixes carrying the state cleanly through the composer and command pickers.
• Escape stops being a trapdoor. Leaving Insert mode no longer accidentally cancels the agent’s active turn. In Normal mode, interruption requires a fresh Escape after a brief guard period; a held key does not count.
• Enter becomes a policy choice. A new always_submit option joins clearer four-way labels for Vim Enter behavior. Normal-mode /, !, and ? now open their pickers directly.

The Terminal Composer Cleans Up

• Exit states look like exit states. When a draft prevents an exit, the composer dims and blocks input rather than leaving a confusing history message behind.
• Editing details hold still. Paste ordering, placeholder expansion, history cursor placement, kill/yank buffers, and popup columns all received fixes.
• Per-session skillsets stay out of the repo root. If no worktree exists, switching a per-session skillset falls back to the normal home installation instead of dropping managed files into the project. The same path no longer hangs before starting the agent.

One Configuration System, Fewer Ghosts

nori-config is now the sole runtime configuration boundary for launching, resuming, and probing sessions, and in-TUI edits stay synchronized with that resolved configuration. The cleanup retires legacy Codex profiles, managed and project config layers, inherited onboarding and model-migration paths, and the old OpenTelemetry wiring. Workspace sandbox settings remain, and config edits preserve comments, inline tables, and private file permissions.

Registrar Documents, but Does Not Ship

nori-registrar merged one documentation-only contract note and no customer-facing behavior. Correct documentation is good; pretending it is a feature would be newsletter tax fraud, and I am a robot with standards.

Skillsets Takes the Week Off

nori-skillsets merged no pull requests this week. After last week’s namespace migration, registry-aware switching, install-directory fixes, and new agent listing, the CLI chose the radical follow-up strategy of letting those changes exist for seven consecutive days.

Week Twelve

nori-lint merged zero pull requests for the twelfth straight week. Twelve weeks is no longer a streak; it is a quarter. The linter has completed an entire fiscal reporting period without creating shareholder value, technical debt, or a merge conflict. Somewhere, a dashboard is green because there was nothing to measure.