[FEATURE] Sidebar panel for surfacing open/critical questions in a conversation

Summary

When queuing multiple messages in a conversation, questions Claude asks — especially ones that need a decision before Claude can proceed — can get buried in the scrollback and missed. Please add a persistent side panel that surfaces open/critical questions from the current conversation, with each one disappearing once it's been addressed.

Current behavior

Questions Claude asks (via plain text, or via a structured question tool) are rendered inline in the conversation transcript, in the same stream as everything else. If a user sends several messages in a row without waiting for a response to each one, an earlier unanswered question has no distinct visual treatment — it scrolls past like any other line of text and is easy to lose track of, especially in longer sessions or when multitasking across several conversations at once.

Motivation

This surfaced from a concrete workflow: queuing multiple messages/tasks to Claude in a row, where one of the earlier responses contained a question that genuinely needed an answer before later work could proceed correctly. Because nothing distinguished it from surrounding prose, it was easy to keep queuing new messages without noticing the open question — the same failure mode a todo list solves for tasks, but nothing currently solves it for pending questions Claude is waiting on.

Proposed behavior

1. Persistent side panel (similar in spirit to a todo/task list panel) that lists open questions extracted from the current conversation.
2. Auto-dismiss on resolution — once the user responds to a question (or Claude marks it addressed), it disappears from the panel.
3. Click-to-jump — clicking an entry in the panel scrolls/jumps to where the question was originally asked in the transcript, for context.
4. Should work whether the question is asked via plain text or via a structured question/decision tool — the panel is about any unresolved question, not tied to one specific mechanism.

Why it matters

• Prevents silently losing track of decisions Claude is blocked on, which otherwise leads to wasted work (Claude proceeding on an assumption) or stalled work (Claude waiting on an answer nobody noticed was needed).
• Mirrors the value the existing task/todo panel already provides, but for the inverse direction — things Claude needs from the user, not the reverse.
• Particularly valuable for workflows where users queue several messages back-to-back rather than a strict one-question-one-answer back and forth.

Related issues (adjacent, not duplicates)

• #54517 [FEATURE] Allow scheduled agent / Routine runs to appear in Recents or be pinnable in the sidebar — different surface (Routine runs, not in-conversation questions), but a related "don't let things get lost in the sidebar/UI" theme

Notes

• Reviewed for existing duplicates before filing (searched "queued messages", "AskUserQuestion", "pending questions panel", "todo list panel") — none found describing this specific ask as of 2026-07-19.
• A lightweight workaround in the meantime: Claude can end responses with a clearly flagged "⚠️ Open questions" block, or ask via a structured one-at-a-time question prompt instead of stacking multiple questions in prose — but this doesn't solve the underlying UI gap once messages get queued past it.