Desktop environment picker: unavailable Remote Control servers shown as live (mobile marks them), and no indication the menu is a create-target picker

Environment

• Claude Desktop: 1.40609.0 (f65e38), built 2026-08-27
• Claude Code CLI: 2.1.233
• macOS (Apple Silicon), Claude iOS app

Two problems with the same menu. Both are about the picker not saying what it knows.

1. Desktop shows unavailable servers as if live; mobile marks them

The mobile app already distinguishes these states: a Remote Control entry that can't be
connected to is drawn with a slashed computer icon and an explicit status line
("Disconnected · Sign in on your computer"). Live ones get a plain computer icon and a
green status.

The desktop environment picker makes no such distinction. After a
claude remote-control server is stopped, its entry stays in the list with its directory
and capacity rendered exactly as when it was running — e.g. <directory> — 1 of 32 sessions.

I'm not arguing the entry should vanish; the four-hour resume window is documented and
keeping the record is reasonable. The problem is that desktop presents a dead server and
a live one identically, when the app already has a designed vocabulary for the difference
and uses it on another surface.

Steps to reproduce

1. Run claude remote-control in a directory on machine A.
2. On machine B, open the environment picker. The server is listed with its capacity.
3. Stop the server on machine A.
4. Re-open the picker on machine B — the entry is unchanged.
5. Open the same account's session list in the iOS app — unavailable entries there are

marked with a slashed computer icon.

Expected

Desktop marks unavailable servers the way mobile does.

2. Nothing in the menu says it's a create-target picker

Local / Cloud / Remote Control / SSH are four nouns answering a question the UI never
states. The menu chooses where a new session will run — but read cold, "Remote
Control" looks like it should list the Remote Control sessions you already have.

That reading is actively reinforced elsewhere in the product: those sessions are visible
and attachable from the desktop session list and from mobile, with no server required. So
a user with a dozen live Remote-Control-connected sessions on another machine opens this
menu, sees an empty state telling them to run claude rc, and reasonably concludes the
feature is broken or off — when in fact attaching already works and only creating needs
a server.

The empty state names a command without saying which machine to run it on, or why the
sessions they can already see don't appear here.

Suggested

Verbs, and a stated subject: "Run on this Mac" / "Run in the cloud" / "Run on another
machine" / "Run over SSH". An empty state along the lines of "No machines are accepting
new sessions. Run claude remote-control on the machine you want to start sessions on."

The distinction that took a long debugging session to find is attach vs create. Every
label in this menu is about create; nothing says so.