“All conversations” now means all conversations

Status: shipped. vocion-core #353 is merged onto the release branch release/2026-09-15-rail (the commit inside it is 98836a3c) and deployed to a deployment we operate. The pull request is still landing on main individually behind that release branch.

Three small things in the chat header, each of which had been quietly wrong for a while.

“All conversations” opened a new conversation

The conversation rail, with the “All conversations” link in its header. The rail header carries an “All conversations” link. Until this afternoon it opened a blank new chat.

The chat menu had a row reading All conversations. It pointed at /dashboard/chat — which starts a new chat. The single row in the product that promised a list delivered a blank composer, which is the most disorienting thing a link can do: it looks like it worked.

It now goes to /dashboard/conversations: every thread, newest first, grouped under Today, Yesterday, Earlier this week and then by month, with a search box that matches on titles and on the text inside the messages.

The scoping rule is worth stating plainly, because "every thread" is not quite true and should not be. A conversation that is scoped to a record — the thread you opened from a particular deal — is per person. The page shows the workspace's unscoped threads plus your own scoped ones, and never anyone else's. The predicate is one clause in ConversationService: scopeRef IS NULL OR createdBy = <you>.

The header control closes as well as opens

The chat control in the title bar only ever opened the rail. Closing it meant remembering ⌘J or hunting for the rail's own collapse handle — two affordances for one piece of state, one of which was invisible.

The request the button sends now carries a toggle flag, and a surface that is already open, mounted, and being asked to do nothing in particular collapses instead. The exception is deliberate: a request that carries intent — the "Ask about this" on a record, a prompt to prefill — always opens. Someone asking a question about a record means to talk, never to close.

The autonomy rung stopped explaining itself in permanent UI

The rung control in the rail header was a labelled chip — a shield icon, the words Ask before acting, and a tooltip carrying the sentence about what that actually means for the agent.

The control before the change. Before: the rung as a labelled chip, with its explanation in a tooltip. A sentence you have already read does not need to be on screen forever.

It is icon-only now. The icon carries the rung, the tooltip names it, and the sentence about what choosing a rung means lives inside the popover, next to the choice it describes — which is where you are when the sentence is useful and nowhere when it is not.

Where this lives in the repo

vocion-core#353, shipped on release/2026-09-15-rail (98836a3c). Eight files.

List page: packages/core/src/app/[locale]/(auth)/dashboard/conversations/page.tsx
Query, grouping and scoping: packages/core/src/services/ConversationService.ts (bucketOf, includeScopedFor, the message-text match)
Toggle: features/dashboard/chat/agentSurface.ts (the toggle field), AgentSurfaceButton.tsx, and the collapse branch in ChatDock.tsx
Rung: features/dashboard/chat/AutonomyControl.tsx
The menu row that changed: features/dashboard/chat/ChatMenu.tsx

Not verified: re-checked against the merged commit (98836a3c), which touches eight files and no test file — the only non-source file in it is RailHeader.stories.tsx. The existing AgentSurfaceButton test still covers the old claim/fallback behaviour and does not assert the toggle; there is no test for the collapse branch, for the conversations query, or for the icon-only control. The three changes were checked by hand on a local workspace.