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ADR 0268: Remove quotes, annotations, and side chats ​

Context ​

Three renderer-owned surfaces grew around the transcript and the composer. ADR message-quotes-and-side-chats added a Quote action to the message action row, a selected-text overlay, and renderer-owned side chats docked in the work panel. ADR response-annotations turned Add to chat on an assistant turn into a numbered annotation attachment carried to the model in a generated # Response annotations: prompt block, and ADR floating-annotation-index added the floating index, source badges and highlights, and the comment editor. ADR 0254's native side-chat fork amendment made those panels work for native-pi: sessions.

Together they are more surface than the product uses. The overlay and the action row both had to recover an excerpt from the rendered DOM; annotations added a second prompt serialization that every display surface (transcript, edit seed, queue preview) has to reverse; and a side chat is a second session lifecycle whose only durable artifact — the forked child — session.fork already produces. Copy, edit, fork, and retry cover the rest.

Decision ​

  1. Message action row. Remove Quote, Annotate, and Open/Ask in side chat from the hover action row of user messages and assistant turns. Copy, Edit and Delete (user messages), Fork, and Retry/Regenerate stay unchanged in place, behavior, labels, and shortcuts.
  2. Selection overlay. Remove the selected-text toolbar entirely: selecting text in the transcript no longer floats an action strip. Delete lib/selection-quote.ts, lib/chat-quotes.ts, the SelectionQuoteButton component and its styles. The composer keeps no quote-prefill path: appendComposerDraftText and quoteMessageIntoComposer and their store action go away.
  3. Annotations. Remove annotations as a feature: the comment editor, the floating annotation index, the answer source badges and highlights, the composer annotation attachment chip, the annotation store slice, and the annotation anchor modules are deleted. A :codex-annotation{index="N"} directive in an answer is no longer recognized; it renders as the ordinary Markdown text it is.
  4. Prompt assembly. The send path no longer composes a # Response annotations: block: api.prompt and enqueuePrompt use the user's text as written, with no generated heading, instruction sentence, or <response-annotations> payload. The display-layer reduction requestTextWithoutAnnotations is deleted with it, so an older stored prompt that already contains the generated block is shown verbatim in the transcript, in edit seeds, and in queue previews instead of being reduced back to the request.
  5. Side chats. Remove side chats as a feature: the first-Send draft lifecycle that created the child session, the renderer transcript projection (projectSideChatEvent), the sidechat: work-panel tab type and its SideChatTab, the registration / release / cascade-cleanup rules, and the availability blocked-reason reporting are all deleted. session.fork stays as a capability and the Fork action stays as its only entry point.
  6. Retired identifiers (retired; must never be reused). Decision IDs D-LOCAL-message-quotes, D-LOCAL-selection-overlay, D-LOCAL-response-annotations, D-native-sidechat-stream, and E2E IDs E2E-CHAT-quote-prefill, E2E-CHAT-selection-markdown, E2E-CHAT-selection-side-chat, E2E-CHAT-annotation-attachments, E2E-CHAT-annotation-session-state, E2E-CHAT-annotation-source-index, E2E-CHAT-annotation-ack-and-steering, E2E-CHAT-side-chat-fork, E2E-CHAT-side-chat-stream, E2E-CHAT-side-chat-add-to-main, E2E-CHAT-side-chat-promote, E2E-CHAT-side-chat-close, and E2E-SESSION-native-side-chat-fork-survives-close are retired and must never be reused for another scenario. The superseded ADR files stay on disk as history.
  7. Boundaries. The host protocol stays v11 and the storage schema stays v15: no new IPC channel, no new permission, no protocol or schema bump, and no Rust change. session.fork, the transcript, the work panel, and the rest of the composer keep their existing contracts.

Preserved behavior ​

  • D134 / session.fork. Fork still resolves a durable child from an anchor message and still activates it, including the native-pi: route of ADR 0254; ADR 0023 is unchanged. Side chats were a consumer of it, not a part of it.
  • D209 / D301. Smart Stop still restores the unanswered send's draft, and per-session draft slots are untouched. With no prefill and no annotation snapshot beside the draft, both paths simply have less to carry.
  • D097 / D128 / D254 / D261. The work panel keeps role, sizing, identity keying, neighbor-close, and per-session switching; losing the sidechat: tab type removes one resource kind, not the model. Transcript reading ownership and the bounded expansion history window are unchanged.
  • The rest of the action row. Copy, Edit, Delete, Retry/Regenerate, and Fork keep their current behavior, tooltips, and accessible names.
  • Child sessions already created. A session forked earlier from a side chat stays an ordinary session in the sidebar, lists, search, and stored history.

Consequences ​

  • A user loses the shortcut of reusing an earlier prompt or answer inside the composer, and loses the panel for asking a side question beside the main conversation; reassembling either means copying text or forking a session and switching to it.
  • A stored prompt written while annotations were enabled can show the generated # Response annotations: heading and payload as plain text, because every display surface now renders the stored string unchanged.
  • The renderer sheds roughly 2000 lines — the overlay, quote recovery, annotation editor, index, badges, and the whole side-chat lifecycle — plus eleven unit-test files and their E2E scenarios.
  • Nothing moves across a process boundary: protocol v11, schema v15, the IPC surface, the permission set, and the Rust host are untouched.

Alternatives considered ​

Hide the entry points and keep the code ​

Rejected: dead branches would still own store slices, i18n keys, CSS, and the generated-block parser, and every later change to the action row or the send path would have to keep them compiling for nobody.

Keep a display-layer compatibility downgrade ​

Rejected: keeping requestTextWithoutAnnotations and the directive parser alive only to prettify old prompts would preserve exactly the second serialization this ADR removes, and a stored prompt that is not sent is harmless as text. Old transcripts are readable without it.

Remove annotations and side chats, keep quotes and the selection overlay ​

Rejected: the overlay, the quote recovery path, and the composer prefill are the largest single block of renderer-only code here, and quoting a whole message or a sentence has an exact substitute in the OS clipboard and the composer.

Turn side chats into an ordinary child-session tab instead of deleting them ​

Rejected: that is Fork plus the existing session list; a new docked tab kind would keep the registration, projection, and cleanup lifecycle while adding a fourth way to reach the same durable child.

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