Labs: icon rail and breadcrumb

[sean-brydon]

Explores a different way to get around Shipyard. It's an opt-in Labs choice, and the sidebar stays the default and is untouched.

Settings › Labs › Layout › Icon rail replaces the sidebar with a 60px rail of projects and a title bar breadcrumb.

What it is

• The rail. Home and Review sit at the top. Below them is one round mark per project, showing its initials with the name underneath.
  • A solid amber count means agents there need you.
  • A blue dot is an agent working, a green dot an agent done in the last few hours.
  • The sidebar's sections are kept as captions. A dashed + offers a new task, project or box.
  • Worktrees, Automations, More and Settings sit at the foot.
• Click a project to go where it needs you, or else to the worktree you last visited, or else to where an agent works. ⌃1–9 do the same from anywhere.
• Point at a project, or press Enter on it, to peek at its worktrees.
  • They're grouped Needs you, Working and Done. Each row says what its agent is doing and, if it's waiting, what it asks.
  • Deny and Allow once work right there.
  • Quiet worktrees fold into one row.
  • The footer has New task in the project, All worktrees and Project settings.
• Point at Home to see an "Everywhere" peek: every agent at work in every project, by what it needs.
• The title bar spans the window and carries the breadcrumb Project / Worktree, with / Agent added when a worktree has more than one agent. Each part is a switcher.
  • The worktree menu is the same list as the peek.
  • The agent menu has the worktree's agents, then New agent here and New terminal.
  • On the right: a "2 need you · shop / main" button that goes to each waiting agent in turn, Search ⌘K, notifications and New task.
• The box name shows only when a project spans several boxes, or its box is away. Away boxes' projects show dashed, and the status bar still counts boxes online.

Code is in app/src/components/rail-layout/. The other changes are small:

• App.tsx has the layout branch.
• TabStrip gets a place prop so the place isn't named twice.
• MenuPopup passes collisionPadding through.
• prefs.layout and the Labs row are new.

Scores

Fresh critic subagents scored each round, 1–10. Earlier rounds' problems were fixed between rounds.

	Round 1	Round 2	Round 3	Round 4	Final
Speed to what needs you	7	7	8	8	8
Switching	6	7	7	6	6
Overview of many agents	4	5	5	5	5
Focus and calm	7	8	7	8	8
Learnability	6	5	6	5	6
Visual quality vs today	6	7	6	7	6

Three axes did not reach 8. What holds them back is the shape of the idea, more than its polish:

• Overview. A project rail answers "which project" but not "which worktree, in what state" without a hover, where today's tree shows it at rest. The Everywhere peek and the dots help, but anything that shows worktrees at rest becomes a second column, and that is a sidebar.
• Switching. Projects are one click or ⌃n. Moving to a sibling worktree takes a hover (or a crumb) and then a click, where the tree takes one click.
• Visual quality. The chrome is three bars (title, tabs, status). With a handful of projects the rail has empty space under the +.

The critics' best-liked parts were the cycling "need you" button, answering permissions from the peek, the room the terminal gets back (about 180px), and the quiet chrome.

Tests

• e2e/rail-layout.spec.ts, in mock mode, covers:
  • the rail peek, then switching worktree from it
  • a click on a project mark, and ⌃n
  • the breadcrumb switching project, worktree and agent
  • the Home peek with Allow once
  • "need you" cycling between agents
  • New task from the title bar, and from a peek through the composer to the new task
  • reaching Settings, and going back to the sidebar from Labs
• Passing: rail-layout.spec.ts (20 of 20 with --repeat-each 4, plus 3 runs that passed and 1 that failed once while a build ran alongside), and rail.spec.ts and sidebar-fleet.spec.ts.
• Passing: pnpm typecheck:plugins, check:titles, check:csp, check:themes, test, build, tsc -p e2e, cargo check and the docs build.
• go vet passed. go test -race ./... passed every package except internal/box, which timed out at 10 minutes on a heavily loaded machine (load average 20–46) along with a timing test. This change touches no Go; CI will judge.

Screenshots at 1440×900 and 1100×750, dark and light, are in the layouts review.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

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Project	Deployment	Actions	Updated
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berth-docs	Ready	Preview	Oct 9, 2026 8:25pm UTC

[sean-brydon]

Stashed: not going ahead with this layout for now. The branch stays for later.