dsh-client-ui-aside

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Browser surface for read-only side conversations ("旁注"). Select prose in a settled assistant reply, click the floating 就此提问 button (or the per-message 💬 action), and a draft with a quote card plus the stable composer opens bound to that selection — nothing durable exists yet. It previews the parent's model/reasoning and permits a local choice without mutating the parent. On send, the Host creates the forked aside and crosses the anchor durability barrier; the client applies that choice to the child, then sends the first question. Closing an unanswered draft leaves nothing behind.

Runs on a stock DSH deployment with no source modifications: the plugin self-mounts its generated Remote stub through ctx.remote.$mount, reads the current session from the runtime sessions service, and contributes its per-message entry to the stock conversation.chat.assistant-actions strip.

The plugin owns these pieces:

• AsideRepository — the Host-backed cache over aside.list/aside.create. The Host is the source of truth; this is an in-memory mirror only (no localStorage, no second local fact).
• DrawerStore — the open-drawer state machine: a draft (selection bound, no session) attaches to a real aside only when the first send succeeds.
• SelectionWatcher — a document-level listener that resolves a selection into a quote-selector anchor and floats the ask button.
• MessageDomRegistry — maps a stock messageId to its turn-tail row as the virtualization/fallback target when exact prose cannot be restored.
• AsideHighlighter + quote — restore each aside's exact Range (TreeWalker + quote selector), paint it with the CSS Custom Highlight API, and center/strengthen that exact span on sidebar navigation; clicking the highlight reopens its aside.
• AsideVisibility — hides confirmed aside children through the public Workspace archive projection while preserving logs and Workspace accounting, coalescing concurrent hide requests.
• AsideDrawer — the overlay-slot panel whose draft and durable states share one bottom model/reasoning, fixed read-only, command, and send toolbar, plus visibility-aware adaptive polling and autoscroll.
• AsideSidebar — the standing rail listing only the current conversation's aside chats (no artifacts, no sources), including current-open state and update time.
• AsideAskAction — the per-message entry that carries the message's exact messageId, resolves its text from history, and opens the same draft drawer.

The durable authority — the aside session, its fork lineage, its read-only posture, and the anchor relationship — lives in the Host (dsh-aside-host).

Stock-only trade-offs

• No per-message DOM identity is published. Stock renders the assistant-actions strip in a sibling node of the message text, so selection attribution uses history matching; the per-message action provides message-precise anchoring.
• Message positioning uses data-chat-anchor-key as a best-effort local DOM hint, with the action node as fallback — never a CSS class name as the sole authority.
• Exact highlight degrades gracefully when the rendered span cannot be recovered or the browser lacks the CSS Custom Highlight API (message-level marking, then the sidebar/action path).
• Asides stay inside their parent navigation hierarchy. Durable children are hidden from grouped, flat, and search navigation through workspace.archiveSession; existing records reconcile when the parent loads.

Model Experience

None directly, as this browser-side surface registers no model tool, prompt section, or provider route. A draft reads the parent's session.models without mutating it; first-send and later switches submit session.selectModel only for the aside child, while messages and whitelisted slash commands use session.prompt. The composed read-only world owns every model request the aside makes.

KV Cache effect

None; this package never assembles model input.

Known Limitations and Deferred Work

• Adaptive polling, not a live subscription — the drawer polls the child history at 700ms while generating and backs off to 2.5s when idle (stopping when hidden/closed and refreshing immediately when visible again).
• Exact highlight is best-effort — Markdown source vs. rendered text, repeated spans, and browsers without the Custom Highlight API degrade to message-level marking.
• The aside index is recovered from the child's first message — a custom durable event type is unavailable on stock 0.1.0-rc.7 (no ignorable append for out-of-repo plugins).