"Thinking..." status indicator no longer appears while Claude is working

[ScottKirvan]

Description

The "Thinking..." text that previously appeared in the chat panel while Claude is processing no longer shows. There is no visual indicator that Claude is actively working, making it difficult to distinguish between Claude processing a request and the panel being stuck or unresponsive.

Expected behavior

A visible status indicator (e.g., "Thinking..." text or equivalent) should appear in the chat panel from the moment a message is sent until the first response token arrives.

Actual behavior

No indicator appears. The panel appears idle while Claude is processing.

Impact

Users cannot tell whether Claude is working or whether something has gone wrong. The Stop button is present but there is no feedback confirming work is in progress.

Notes

This may be related to recent changes in how the assistant bubble is initialized or how streaming state is tracked. The indicator should be present for the full duration between send and first streamed token.

[ScottKirvan]

Update: It looks to be working sometimes, so I'm wondering if it just gets lost in these multistep, more complex tasks when claude is outputing text as it goes along: "I'm going to read these files." "let me grab this webpage." "now I understand the problem, let me write the note". I'm not sure yet - will keep trying to narrow this down.

[SKVFX-DevBot]

Picking this up. Root cause identified: in ClaudeView.ts, assistantEl.setText(accumulated) inside the onText callback replaces all child nodes (including statusEl). Subsequent onToolCall callbacks call statusEl.setText() on a detached element, so the status update is invisible. Fix: introduce a dedicated streamingTextEl span for streaming text so statusEl can be preserved as a sibling and re-appended when tool calls fire after text has been streamed.