[Desktop 2.37337.1] Sidebar structure changed to nested sessions without any notice or reason

+1. Same 2.37337.1 rollout hit me on macOS on 2026-10-14, with no notice, changelog entry, or opt-out. Agree with both requests: document structural UI changes with the reason, and give users a setting to keep the previous layout.

To be clear about scope: I don't have a workaround for the nesting by parent session described here. If anyone finds one, please post it.

For anyone who also lost per-folder grouping in the same update (sessions from many project folders dumped into one "Default" list), that part is fixable: the migration only created "environments" for your top 8 folders. Creating an environment for each missing folder (Choose environment → New environment → Add folder) puts that folder's sessions back in their own section, and new sessions stay there. A tested all-at-once method (app fully quit, edits the app's local store; macOS-verified, Windows path untested) is here: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/102088#issuecomment-6174848568

Related: #102088, #102125.

+1. After the latest update the sidebar mixes sessions from all my repos into one list. "Group by" only offers None / Status / Date / Environment — no Repository option. With two repos on the same cloud environment there's no way to separate them except manual sections. Please add "Group by → Repository" and a repository filter.

+1. Claude 2.37337.1 (ba51ab) 2026-10-13T14:04:25.000Z
Claude for Mac

My sessions were grouped by working folder earlier today, now I can no longer group in the same way.

https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/102088

There is a workaround for bulk detaching all nested sessions at once, see <https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/100216#issuecomment-6179741349>.

[!IMPORTANT] Still, please add a setting for a flat sidebar, nobody should need a workaround like this.

Same build (desktop 2.37337.1, CLI 2.1.295, Windows). Adding measurements from one affected session, since the structure here is worse than it looks in the sidebar.

The hierarchy is deep, but it renders flat. One of my sessions has 61 descendants, nested 9 levels deep. The sidebar draws every one of them at a single indent level, as if they were all immediate children of the top-level session. So what is actually a chain reads as ~40 unrelated siblings:

session
└── Add Galderma, Servier, Boehringer home reports (chip)
└── Build the German HGB §325 route for private filers
└── Model Germany's three regimes in jurisdiction_regime
└── Model the other 14 jurisdictions
└── Wire jurisdiction regimes into classify_completeness

Those are five rows in my sidebar, all drawn at the same depth. If you look at the raw markdown you can see the five level nesting, sorry, it doesn't show up that way in github. The nesting data is right; the rendering in the Claude Desktop UI discards it. That makes the tree both unreadable and impossible to clean up by eye, because you cannot tell which rows are roots and which are leaves. (another thing: since the whole panel has a fixed maximum width, the more nesting levels you have, the less of your title you'd be able to read.)

Background-task chips are the main way this accumulates. I use them heavily — each spun-off task becomes a child, and tasks spun off from those become grandchildren. They're the easiest way to tell Claude Desktop "generate a good starting prompt for this related problem and launch it into its own session." Often the spun-off children are generalizations of or merely adjacent tasks to the earlier parent task ("Let me merge this narrow solution and then move onto the broader problem I discovered in a new session"), so nesting them as children doesn't really make sense. 57 of my 61 descendants came from a single chip, over about three weeks. Nothing about creating a chip signals that it will nest, and the chips themselves are useful; it’s the resulting hierarchy that is not.

Detaching does not cascade. Detaching the direct child moved it to top level with all 57 of its descendants still nested under it. One fewer indent level, same tree. Fully flattening would mean detaching every interior node individually.

The programmatic path excludes exactly these sessions. detach_session refuses with:

detach_session only moves a session this session started

A chip-created session counts as user-placed, so it is not detachable that way — i.e. the one scriptable escape hatch does not cover the sessions the feature actually nests.

There is no setting to turn it off. Checked against the full Code-tab preference list (auto-archive, branch prefix, notifications, remote control, output style, prompt suggestions, keep-awake): nothing for session nesting, settable or locked.

It applied retroactively. The parent links were recorded long before the feature shipped — my oldest here dates to 23 September, I have other sessions quite a bit older — so a month of previously flat history reorganised itself into a tree the user never imagined authoring.

A per-user “show sessions as top-level” switch would solve it (see anthropics/claude-code#100216, currently scoped to forks — worth widening to chip-spawned sessions). Short of that, a cascading detach, or rendering real depth instead of flattening it, would each help a lot.

Fundamentally I won't say I completely hate the idea of nesting child sessions this way because sometimes it would be useful to see the lineage of sessions but the retroactive "surprise" and "no way to disable" and "no way to script" and "no way to say 'Detach all descendants (cascade)' from a point in the tree are killing me here.

I'm actually an enterprise software product manager for decades now and I can honestly say this really wasn't thought through.