[Feature]: Surface active loop state — a looping thread reads as finished between iterations

[directfilm]

Problem

When a thread is running on a loop, each iteration ends with a normal-looking completion — often literally the word "done" — and the thread settles. Then several minutes later it wakes up and runs again.

From the UI there is no way to tell the difference between a thread that has finished and a thread that is thirty seconds away from its next iteration. Both look identical: a settled thread with a completed final turn. So the state shown is not just incomplete, it's wrong in the direction that costs you something — you conclude the work is over, close the thread or start something else, and the loop quietly fires again behind you.

The longer the interval, the worse it gets. A loop on a twenty-minute cadence spends nearly all its life looking finished.

What I'd want to see

For a thread in an active loop:

• That it is looping at all — a persistent indicator on the thread, not just inside the transcript, so it's visible from the thread list.
• How long it has been looping — elapsed time and/or iteration count.
• When the next iteration fires — a countdown, which is the piece that actually changes behaviour. "Next run in 4m" tells me whether to wait or to go and do something else.
• Suppressed settling — a looping thread shouldn't enter the Done/settled state between iterations, since it hasn't finished.

Both loop shapes matter and I hit both: fixed-interval runs, and self-paced ones where the model chooses its own next wake-up. The self-paced case is the more misleading of the two, because the cadence is irregular so there's no rhythm to learn.

Scope, honestly

/loop is a Claude Code CLI-side skill, not a T3 feature, so T3 has no native notion of loop state today — which is presumably why nothing like this is on the tracker. The loop is driven by a scheduled wake-up whose delay and reason the harness emits as a tool call in the stream T3 already renders, so my guess is that the signal is reachable client-side without new provider plumbing, but you'd know far better than I would whether that holds.

If full detection is too speculative, the floor is still worth having: don't settle a thread that has a pending scheduled wake-up. A neutral "still running" beats a confident "done" that is wrong.

There's useful precedent here. #5043 was closed on the basis that #5219 and #7152 landed work which "adds native task and workflow activity, keeps active tool work visible, and shows background liveness after the foreground turn ends." So the concept of a thread staying visibly alive past a completed-looking turn is already accepted and built — for native tasks. A loop iteration is the same liveness problem for a schedule that originates CLI-side rather than in T3. The same closure kept open #5476, where settlement still ignores a live child, which is the settling half of what I'm describing.

Relationship to existing threads

• [Feature]: Recurring/standing threads as a first-class kind — the Done/settle/unread lifecycle assumes every thread terminates #6899 describes this pain generically — "quiet between bursts is its normal resting state, not a completion" — but proposes a manual per-thread mode. This is the automatic half: the thread already knows it's looping, so it shouldn't need me to tell it. Complementary, and [Feature]: Recurring/standing threads as a first-class kind — the Done/settle/unread lifecycle assumes every thread terminates #6899 is the better home if you'd rather solve it manually first.
• [Feature]: Durable per-thread "never settle" pin — the existing "active" override is cleared by activity, so no thread can be kept permanently active #6898 (durable never-settle pin) is the same manual-override family.
• [Feature]: Scheduled Prompts #6748 (Scheduled Prompts) is where T3-originated scheduling is tracked. Different thing — that's T3 owning a schedule, this is T3 displaying one it doesn't own — but if T3 ever does own scheduling natively, this UI would presumably ride along with it.

Environment

T3 Code Nightly 0.0.39-nightly.20260904.1274, macOS 26.6.2.