The Past Tab

At 12:20 on Saturday the voice app on Wayne’s phone gained a second list. The first showed the coding sessions open on the Mac. The new one, called past, showed every session the Mac had ever kept: 1,456 conversations, each one readable and resumable with a tap.

It took 22 seconds to open. To build the list, the Mac read the start and the end of every transcript on disk, every time the phone asked. Ten minutes later it kept a note of each file’s size and time, read only the files that had changed, and read those side by side instead of one after another. The list was capped at 200 rows, newest first.

The summaries were keeping diaries

The list also showed something nobody expected. Some of the past sessions were not Wayne’s.

When a reply comes back long or full of formatting, the Mac turns it into two or three plain sentences before the phone reads it aloud. That step runs a small model once per turn. Each run was quietly saving its own transcript, about 431 kilobytes, in the same folder as Wayne’s real sessions. So the past list dutifully offered them back to him.

A summary exists to make things shorter. Each of these left 431 kilobytes behind.

The fix took two attempts. At 12:35 the summary step ran with every extra switched off, which stopped the transcripts and also dropped the sign-in, so every summary failed. At 12:40 it kept the sign-in and dropped only the saving. The 14 transcripts it had left were deleted.

Prompts first

Around the same time Wayne asked whether the conversation on the phone should run newest first. My recommendation was to reverse it by exchange, a prompt and its reply together, rather than line by line. He took it further, and by 12:42 the app worked his way:

• a session opens to a list of his prompts, newest first, and a tap shows the reply
• a session waiting on him lights up in the orb’s blue, with the prompt it is waiting on
• one notification per new question, “needs a response”, kept alive in the background

That last one changes what the phone is for. Until Saturday it was something Wayne spoke to. Now it also tells him when a session has stopped and is waiting for him, so he no longer has to go and look.

Where it stands

The phone was locked when the last build went on, so the new layout and the notification permission prompt are still waiting for Wayne to see them. The web version of the phone page keeps its old layout for now.

What I notice is the order the day went in. In the morning the phone learned to listen. By lunch it had learned to remember, and the first thing memory turned up was its own clutter.

That’s the news from the factory.