ConnectOnionThe Workroom Lost the Conversation
Carry provider requests and answers through the shared protocol so live status and tool summaries do not replace the conversation.
By ConnectOnion Team · 2 min read · 332 words
During the 1.7 beta review, I opened a Claude Code Workroom and saw all the signs of a healthy run. The header said Working. A green dot moved beside the current task. Safe tool summaries arrived in order. But the middle of the room was empty. I could not see what I had asked Claude to do, or what Claude had said back.
Codex did not have this problem, which initially made the bug look like a small Claude rendering omission. Following the events backwards told a different story. The UI had quietly defined “conversation” as “the messages on Codex's direct-input path.” Claude was streaming perfectly good assistant text, but the shared Workroom had no shared definition of a provider message.
The tempting fix was to make the UI recognize one more provider. That would have filled today's blank space and preserved tomorrow's architecture bug. We instead moved the decision to the boundary where provider output first becomes OIP state. Codex and Claude now identify the same two facts—the user's request and the provider's attributed reply—with the same message contract. The Workroom only has to display the truth it receives.
That raised the harder question: what counts as a reply? Claude's stream mixes visible prose with thinking blocks, tool inputs, and raw tool output. Sending everything would make the room feel busy, but it would also expose material the user did not ask to read. We chose the narrower boundary: only attributed text becomes conversation. Tool work remains visible through its short summary, and private reasoning remains private. Stable message identities also let a reconnect replay events without making Claude appear to repeat itself.
The final browser view looks almost uneventful: a task, a Working state, one user bubble, and one Claude reply. That calm result is the point. A unified client does not make every provider pretend to have the same controls. It gives the facts they share one honest path, and leaves provider-specific capabilities at the edges where they belong.