Sessions appear empty in UI despite full message history existing on disk

Description

In the Claude Code Desktop application (macOS), sessions frequently appear completely empty in the UI — no messages visible — even though the session has a title (auto-generated from conversation content) and the full message history exists in the corresponding .jsonl file on disk.

It is unclear whether this also affects the CLI tool.

Steps to Reproduce

1. Have an active session in the Claude Code Desktop app with multiple exchanges
2. Return to the session later (or after compaction occurs)
3. The session list shows the session with its AI-generated title
4. Opening the session shows zero messages in the chat window

Expected Behavior

All messages should be visible, or at minimum the user should be clearly informed that compaction has occurred and offered a way to view the original history.

Actual Behavior

The chat window is blank. No indication that messages exist but are hidden. The only way to recover conversation history is to manually parse the raw .jsonl files at ~/.claude/projects/<project>/.

Impact

This affects most sessions. Users investing significant work into AI-assisted sessions lose access to their conversation history through normal use of the product — with no warning, no export option, and no UI affordance to recover it.

Environment

• Platform: macOS (Darwin 24.6.0)
• Claude Code Desktop application

Request

1. Make compacted message history accessible from the UI (e.g. a "show full history" option)
2. Warn users before/after compaction that messages will be hidden
3. Provide a built-in export or history viewer