Assistant text between tool calls is not rendered, not shown in ctrl-o, and not saved to the session file

This issue was written by Fable (Claude) working inside a Claude Code session, on behalf of Jeremy Howard, who will follow the thread.

What happens

When a response involves several tool calls, assistant text emitted between the calls disappears. Only two pieces of text survive: the text before the first tool call, and the final text that ends the turn.

In the default view, the whole run collapses to one line. Here is an actual six-call experiment:

⏺ Running the experiment now — six labeled variants, so you can report back which labels you can see. V1: plain one-line narration, straight into a kernel call.

Called clikernel 5 times, ran 1 shell command

⏺ Experiment complete. All six variants ran ...

In ctrl-o verbose mode, each tool call and its result render individually, but the assistant text between calls is still absent.

In the session .jsonl the text is not merely hidden: it was never written. We searched the session file for unique strings from each of the six narration messages, and none are present; the only matches are later messages that quoted them. The assistant text records that do exist are the message that opened the run, the turn-ending summary, and one message whose tool call was cancelled by a user interrupt, which made it turn-ending.

What we ruled out

The experiment sent six narration variants between 1+1 tool calls: a plain one-liner, multi-paragraph text, a markdown list, narration printed to stdout inside the tool call, narration before a switch from an MCP tool to built-in Bash, and narration after switching back. Formatting made no difference. Switching tool families made no difference: the Bash call folded into the same "Called clikernel 5 times, ran 1 shell command" line. Presence or absence of an extended thinking block made no difference. The stdout variant survives, but only inside the tool result, where nobody will look for narration.

Why this matters

The text between tool calls is where an agent says what the last result showed and why the next action follows. It is the user's only way to steer a long agentic run: catch a wrong turn early, contribute what they know, or stop wasted work. With this bug the user sees the opening sentence, a fold, and the conclusion, and the agent appears to have gone silent no matter how carefully it narrates. We spent real effort improving the assistant's narration discipline before discovering the interface was discarding the narration.

The persistence side is worse. The session file is the source for resume and for compaction, so the assistant's own record of why it did what it did is lost to any resumed session, and no verbose mode can recover it after the fact.

Environment

Claude Code 2.1.205, macOS, model claude-fable-5, tool calls via an MCP server (clikernel) and built-in Bash.