Let me scroll through an old session before committing to resume it
Problem
When opening an old session, the chooser forces a commit upfront:
This session is 2d 19h old and 169.2k tokens.
Resuming the full session will consume a substantial portion of your usage limits.
We recommend resuming from a summary.
❯ 1. Resume from summary (recommended)
2. Resume full session as-is
3. Don't ask me again
Both options load the session into context (full or summarized) before I've even seen what's in it. I just want to open it and scroll — read the transcript, remember what was going on, look at the last few turns — and only then decide whether to resume full, compact/summarize, or close it and walk away.
Proposed behavior
Opening an old session should drop me into a read-only view of the transcript with no context-window cost. The "how do you want to resume?" decision happens at the moment I try to send a new message, not at the moment I open the session.
Flow:
- Pick session from agents view → transcript opens, scrollable, no tokens spent.
- I scroll, read, decide.
- First time I type a message and hit send → that's when the chooser appears: resume full, resume from summary, cancel.
This separates "view" from "activate." Today they're fused.
Why it matters
The current UX punishes curiosity. If I have several old sessions and want to pick the right one, or just remind myself what I was doing, I have to either pay the token cost or use out-of-band tools (grep the JSONL). Most users won't know the out-of-band path exists.
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