Workflow progress view: phase dot colours are undocumented, and two runs in identical states render different colours

What happened

The desktop app's workflow progress view renders a coloured dot per agent under each phase. I have observed four distinct renderings: grey (filled), blue (filled), yellow/orange (filled, with the phase label also turning yellow), and hollow/outline.

Two problems, and the second is why I'm filing rather than just asking:

1. The colours are undocumented. I searched docs.claude.com, support.claude.com and anthropic.com and could not find any description of what these colours mean. The only documented color concept I could find is the color: field in a custom subagent's .claude/agents/*.md frontmatter — that is agent identification, not run status, and it is not set on these agents.

2. Two workflows in identical recorded states rendered different colours. Two Workflow runs were executing concurrently. Both were on their final phase with exactly one agent still in flight. One rendered that phase's dot blue; the other rendered it yellow with a yellow phase label. Same state, different colour.

I checked their journal.jsonl files rather than guessing from the UI, and found nothing that distinguishes them:

run A (rendered BLUE):    {'started': 18, 'result': 17}   1 agent in flight
run B (rendered YELLOW):  {'started': 13, 'result': 12}   1 agent in flight

Both journals contained only started and result events — zero error, retry, skip or empty-result events. So no recorded state differentiates them.

I initially assumed the yellow one was the "focused/expanded" card, since it happened to have a phase expanded at the time. A later screenshot with both cards collapsed still showed one blue and one yellow, which refuted that.

What I expected

Either:

• the colours map to documented, distinct agent/phase states — in which case please document them; or
• identical states render identically — in which case the differing colour is a rendering bug.

Repro

1. Invoke Workflow twice so both run concurrently, with different agent counts per phase.
2. Watch the final phase of each while exactly one agent is in flight in both.
3. Observe that the two phases can render in different colours despite identical journal state.

(Both of my runs used the same script shape: a fan-out phase, a per-item verification phase, and a single final synthesis agent. They differed in agent count and in whether an initial single-agent phase existed.)

Possibly related

There is precedent for this view diverging from the underlying data — a changelog entry records a fix for "the workflow progress view dropping the earliest agents from the list while the phase counter stayed correct" in SDK and desktop-app sessions. That was a different symptom, but the same view and the same class (render state not matching recorded state).

Why it matters

The progress view is the only live signal for a long-running multi-agent workflow. If a colour indicates something actionable — a stall, a retry, a slow agent — an operator needs to know. If it indicates nothing, it invites exactly the wrong inference. In my case I could only resolve the question by reading journal.jsonl directly, which is not a reasonable expectation for a UI indicator.

Environment

• Claude Code 2.1.220, desktop app
• Windows 11 Pro 26200
• Model: Opus 5