Sidebar & Cmd-K session list empties after app relaunch on macOS (data intact on disk)

What happens

On the macOS desktop app, after quitting and reopening, the sidebar and Cmd-K search show no past Claude Code conversations — only the live/current session renders. This persists across relaunches.

Data is NOT lost (this is a renderer/UI bug, not storage)

The transcripts and session stores are fully intact on disk, and the main process loads them on startup:

• ~/.claude/projects/*/*.jsonl — 244 transcripts present
• ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude-code-sessions/ — 60 session JSONs
• ~/Library/Logs/Claude/main.log on startup: Loaded 59 persisted sessions from …
• Sessions remain fully reachable via claude --resume <id> and the MCP session tools (list_sessions returns everything)

So the data is loaded into the main process fine; the renderer just doesn't display the persisted session list — only the session created in the current run shows up.

Environment note (rules out path / folder / repo causes)

The project folder was moved (~/Desktop/Claude OS → ~/Claude OS) and lives under a private git repo. But the session data lives outside the repo, in ~/.claude/ and ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/, and is unaffected by git. Crucially, sessions created after the move — with clean, current paths — also vanish from the sidebar after relaunch, while list_sessions still returns them. So this is neither the folder move, nor stale paths, nor the repo; it's the renderer not rendering the loaded session list.

Versions affected

• First seen on 1.20186.9
• Still present on 1.21459.0
• Still present on 1.22209.3 (current)

Regression appears to have started around the 1.20186.1 → .9 update.

Expected

Persisted sessions listed in the sidebar and Cmd-K after relaunch, as before.

Actual

Only the current run's session appears; all prior sessions are absent from sidebar + Cmd-K (but recoverable via claude --resume).

Environment

• macOS (Darwin 25.3.0)
• Claude desktop app 1.22209.3

Possibly related but distinct: #24172 (VSCode extension, reported as unrecoverable) — this report is the macOS desktop app with data confirmed intact and recoverable.