Sessions disappear mid-conversation from Recents sidebar AND claude resume — macOS

Summary

Active and recently-used sessions are vanishing from both the desktop-app Recents sidebar and the claude resume picker, despite the session JSONLs being present on disk. Symptom is mid-conversation (no relaunch), and multiple sessions in the same project are affected.

Related but distinct from #53165 (after-relaunch, Windows, sidebar frozen on one ancient session).

Environment

• macOS Darwin 25.1.0
• Claude Code desktop app: v1.5354.0
• Claude Code CLI: v2.1.123

What I observed

1. Currently typing into a session in the desktop app — the session does not appear in the Recents sidebar.
2. Closed the app and ran claude resume from the project directory — the active session is not in that list either, and several other recent sessions from the same project are also missing.
3. Inspected ~/.claude/projects/<encoded-project-path>/: 5 JSONL files spanning the last 4 days are present and the current one is being actively appended to (mtime updates every few seconds).
4. The Recents sidebar and claude resume show a stale subset — the older sessions appear, the newer ones don't.

Expected

• Recents and claude resume reflect the JSONLs actually on disk.
• The active foreground session always appears in Recents.

Actual

• Both surfaces show a stale subset that omits the currently-active session.
• Recovery requires claude --resume <session-uuid> with the UUID looked up manually from disk — works, but not discoverable.

Severity

Medium. No data loss — JSONLs persist on disk and recovery via UUID works. The gap is discoverability: a user who closes the window without the UUID has effectively lost UI access. For me, ~30 hours of work across affected sessions.

Possible trigger (speculative — not verified)

I notice an empty directory at ~/.claude/projects/-Users-...-ifyhq--claude-worktrees-<name>/ corresponding to a git worktree that was torn down during one of the affected sessions. I have not verified that the worktree teardown is the trigger — but the timing correlates and the empty dir suggests an index/path mismatch may be involved. Happy to provide more diagnostics if useful.

Workaround

ls -lat ~/.claude/projects/<encoded-project-path>/*.jsonl
# pick the UUID by mtime
cd <project-root>
claude --resume <uuid>