ADR 0294: Project archive is a list + inspector workbench

• Status: Accepted
• Date: 2026-09-20
• Decision: D455
• Amends: D267 / D168 (row anatomy and inline expansion)
• Related: D133 (archive always visible), D257 (capability workbench), 04-ux/06-settings-ia.md, 06-delivery/04-e2e-test-plan.md (E2E-038)

Context

D267 collapsed Project archive to one workbench: a quiet intro, one toolbar, and one panel whose Pinned / All projects / Archived groups were in-panel strips. Each row still carried a disclosure control, two lines of metadata, state tags, a hover action pair, and an inline session list. Adding more projects made the destination hard to scan: expanding one row pushed the rest of the index, and clicking a name activated the project and left Settings.

The durable index is a management surface. Selecting a project to inspect it must not leave the page.

Decision

1. Keep the intro and toolbar. One description line, Recent/Name sort, search with a live match count, and Add project. No hero, gradient, or page-level counters (D267).
2. Replace the single expanding list with a list + inspector. The index keeps Pinned / All projects / Archived as labelled regions with per-section counts. Compact rows show the color glyph (Star when pinned, Folder otherwise), name, one status tag (Active / Open / Archived), session count, and relative time. Empty groups are omitted.
3. Click selects; activation is explicit. A click (or ArrowUp/ArrowDown) selects the row and keeps Settings open. Double-click, Enter, or the inspector Open action activates the project and returns to chat. Archive and close still keep Project archive open.
4. The inspector owns management, in one column. Folders, chats (latest first, batches of eight), New task, and the existing menu (instructions, memory, edit, pin, archive/restore, two-step delete, close) open under the selected row at full content width. There is no side-by-side pane. Archived records stay grouped and visible; there is still no visibility toggle (D133).
5. Search still matches session titles. A session-title hit keeps the owning project in the index, selects it, and lists the matching chats in the inspector.
6. Presentation only. No IPC, storage, host protocol, or activation semantics change beyond the click-vs-activate split on this destination.

Consequences

• Compact rows stay scannable; only the selected project opens its full-width detail.
• A single click no longer leaves Settings, which is the management path; the chat path is Open / double-click / Enter / opening a session.
• Source-contract tests for the archive destination now cover the workbench and the extracted project-archive helpers.

Alternatives

• Keep inline expansion and add a density toggle. Rejected: the row still dumps every action onto the index.
• Hide archived records behind a filter. Rejected: D133 forbids a visibility toggle on this destination.