deepseek-harness/.agents/notes/archived/feature/2026-07-21-tui-no-banner.md

Agent Note: No startup banner

Status: implemented Archived: 2026-07-26

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Superseded by the borderless-banner Agent Note: the banner and its sweep return without the box. The model's footer home this note added stays.

Problem

The TUI opened with a boxed product banner ("DEEPSEEK HARNESS" + model/session detail), most recently with a sweep-in animation (banner sweep Agent Note). The user's verdict: remove it. A product title re-read on every boot is chrome, the box spends four rows before any content, and the identifying facts it carried (model, session) have better homes.

Decision

• HeaderComponent, the sweep animation, and its lifecycle wiring are deleted. The TUI mounts straight into the transcript; startup renders nothing above the separator.
• The model name moves into the footer status line's left segment (<model> <cwd> ↑tokens ↓tokens), so the session's driving model stays visible at all times, not just at boot. The session id is no longer displayed — it lives in the session log and ./.sessions filenames, where dsh --resume <id> and the /resume selector retrieve it.
• welcome, when configured, renders as the transcript's first line (a muted notice) inside rebuildTranscript, so palette swaps preserve it. Unset renders nothing. Fixtures keep their configured welcomes; the PTY smoke's boot marker becomes the footer's model name, the only mounted-TUI text guaranteed to render regardless of cwd length.

This supersedes the banner sweep Agent Note entirely: both the sweep and the banner it animated are gone.

Alternatives considered

Keep a one-line header (no box). Rejected: the only load-bearing fact was the model name, and the footer already aggregates session status; a dedicated header row for one fact is the same chrome, smaller.

Show the session id in the footer too. Rejected: a 36-char UUID dominates the 100-column footer and clips the status segment; it identifies the session for resume, which is a log/filesystem concern, not a glanceable one.

Print the welcome outside the transcript (above the separator). Rejected: any fixed region above the transcript is a banner again; as a transcript line it scrolls away naturally and survives rebuilds through the same path as every other transcript element.

Consequences

• Startup output is fully deterministic again — no animation frames at all; the interval-lifecycle machinery from the two animation iterations is gone.
• All 26 pi-tui terminal snapshots re-recorded (test:snapshot:refresh): banner rows gone, footer rows gain the model prefix.
• Anything that anchored on banner text (DEEPSEEK, box corners) re-anchors on the footer model name; main-session- no longer appears in boot output.
• /clear now wipes the welcome line too: it is an ordinary transcript line, and /clear empties the transcript (the old banner survived /clear only by sitting outside it).
• The footer's left segment is wider; on narrow terminals the right status segment clips earlier.

Testing

packages/ui/tui/tests/tui.spec.ts pins: no box corners/product title and an empty transcript when welcome is unset, with the model in the footer; a configured welcome as the first transcript line without a banner; and the welcome surviving a palette-swap transcript rebuild. The PTY smoke boots on the footer model name and asserts DEEPSEEK HARNESS is absent. Snapshots verify the full frames.