Sessions cannot be renamed, and auto-generated titles make long-running work unfindable

What happens

A session is titled automatically from its opening message, and that title is permanent. There is no rename option in the UI, and editing the title in the session's own JSON (~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude-code-sessions/.../local_*.json) is overwritten by the running app within minutes — titleSource is reset from user back to auto.

Verified directly: the value was set to a user-chosen title with titleSource: "user", and both fields had reverted within two minutes.

Why it matters

I have a session containing two days and ~4,800 messages of work on my game — physics research, twenty-five passing tests, design decisions, and machine diagnostics. It is titled "Login authentication issue," because that is what I happened to ask in the first minute, before the real work started.

In two weeks, when I come back from other projects, the Recents list is the only place I have to find it. It will say "Login authentication issue." I will scroll past my own work.

This is not hypothetical. I have lost sessions dozens of times, and hundreds of hours of work with them.

What the screen actually looks like

The left sidebar is the entire organizational model, and it contains:

• the Home / Code toggle
• New, Artifacts, Customize, More
• Recents — a flat list of two auto-generated titles: "Login authentication issu…" and "Dispatch background co…"
• roughly two-thirds of the sidebar below that is empty

The window title bar shows the same auto-generated string. Nothing on screen distinguishes two days of project work from a five-minute question, and there is nowhere to put that distinction even if I wanted to. Both visible titles were written by a classifier on the first message. One of them is a game.

The wider problem

Recents is a flat, auto-labelled list, and it is all there is. There is no way to group sessions by project, pin one, or name one — the three things anyone with more than one project needs. The space to do it is already on screen and unused.

Suggested fixes, in order of how much they would help

1. Let users rename a session — and make the rename stick.
2. Pin or favourite a session so it doesn't fall out of Recents.
3. Group Recents by project or working directory, in the empty sidebar space that already exists.
4. Failing that: generate the title from the whole session rather than the first message, or re-title as the subject changes.

Environment

Claude Code desktop app, macOS 26, Opus 5.