[BUG] Claude Desktop history entries render blank when session metadata is missing cliSessionId

Preflight Checklist

• [x] I have searched existing issues and this specific failure mode does not appear to be documented yet
• [x] This is a single bug report
• [x] I am using a current Claude Desktop / Claude Code install

What's Wrong?

Claude Desktop can show old Code/Cowork sessions in the history picker, but clicking one opens a blank conversation pane or an indefinite loading state when the Desktop metadata file exists but is missing cliSessionId.

This is different from the already-reported cases where all metadata is missing after a migration, or where MSIX leaves files stuck as .json.tmp. In this case the local_<uuid>.json metadata file is present and readable, so the picker entry appears, but Desktop has no bridge to the actual CLI transcript JSONL.

Observed local architecture:

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[!IMPORTANT] Recovery toolkit: I've published a diagnostic and repair toolkit that covers this and five related Windows session-recovery cases - https://github.com/BasedGPT/claude-code-session-recovery python tools/diagnose.py is read-only. It identifies which failure mode a given install is in and prints the next command. Covers missing cliSessionId (this issue), conversation history missing from disk, duplicate metadata pointing at the same transcript, junction/path-alias splits, metadata wiped by Desktop updates, and a couple of cosmetic-only states. Windows only.