[FEATURE] Focus View: keep "human-related" messages and tasks visibile
Status Open
Maintainer reply None cached
Activity 4 comments · opened Aug 4, 2026
Preflight Checklist
- [x] I have searched existing requests and this feature hasn't been requested yet
- [x] #86309
Problem Statement
the newly added focus view is awesome, but is hiding too much.
Messages related to the human, like "I'm doing this because" or "I have to find ...." or the ordered list of tasks created and being run should be shown , these are messages in "human language" that the human should read to see what's going on.
Focus view should only hide command executions, code diff and similiar, not the modal talking to the human
Proposed Solution
Keep human-related phrases shown
Alternative Solutions
_No response_
Priority
Medium - Would be very helpful
Feature Category
CLI commands and flags
Use Case Example
_No response_
Additional Context
_No response_
4 Comments
Is it just me, or is anyone else seeing this behavior in focus mode?
Claude almost always refers to decisions that are invisible because they're hidden by focus mode.
Plus, it frequently gets stuck waiting for user actions that aren't even shown because they're hidden.
Focus mode should only hide command execution and the relative output, not the direct messages to the user.
Supporting this from a different angle: on 2.1.241 focus mode does not only hide intermediate "I'm doing this because" text — it also hides the final answer of a finished turn, even when that answer is a standalone text-only API message with no tool call in it. Details and transcript evidence in #50894 (auto-closed as stale, reopen requested).
So the ask here is arguably not just "keep human-related phrases shown" — the current behaviour can drop the one message the operator was meant to read, silently. For long autonomous sessions, where the operator reads only the last message per turn, that turns focus mode into a way to lose conclusions rather than to hide noise.
Totally agree, experiencing the same
Claude often refer to something written in the chat but the message is hidden somewere, like: "waiting for your decision on question 1" but question 1 is not visibile, i have to expand all collapsed messages and look for the question
Filed the bug side of this as #89318 (focus mode dropping the final text-only message of a finished turn), in case it helps weigh this request.