The thing you noticed
Someone online was using a kanban-style board to route ideas into sessions. You then spotted your own app's status filter (Needs input · Ready for review · Working · Completed · Archived) and wondered if you were missing a feature. You're not — that filter IS the kanban board. It's native. What's actually off isn't the tool, it's how the sessions underneath it are scoped: your list — ! Web, General, General Coding, ! Main — reads as four standing project folders, not discrete pieces of work. That's the thing worth fixing.
What a session actually is
- A session is one continuous conversation with its own context window — everything said in it, every file read, every tool call, stays in that window until it's compacted or the session ends
- It's tied to a working directory (a project folder) and, optionally, a git worktree — but the directory doesn't define the session's scope, you do, by what you ask it to work on
- Official guidance is explicit and cuts against the holding-tank pattern: one session per workstream, named for what it does (
oauth-migration,fix-login-bug) — not for what folder it lives in - The documented anti-pattern has a name: a "kitchen sink session." Mixing unrelated tasks in one session fills the context window with irrelevant history, and answer quality measurably degrades as that happens
The five states in your filter
| State | What it means |
|---|---|
| Working | Claude is actively running tools or generating a response right now |
| Needs input | Blocked on you — a question, a permission prompt, a decision only you can make |
| Ready for review | Claude finished a turn and is waiting for you to look at the result before it continues |
| Completed | The task was signaled done — often after a verification step, or because you said so |
| Archived | Pulled out of the active list — done-done, or parked |
This is effectively a live kanban board of every thread of work you have going, for free, with no board to maintain by hand. It only tells you something useful, though, if each card (session) is one coherent thing — five "General Coding" sessions all sitting in "Working" tells you nothing.
Local vs. cloud sessions — the icon next to each one
| Icon | Meaning |
|---|---|
| 💻 Laptop | Runs on this Mac — filesystem, tools, MCP connections, and credentials all stay local. Closing the laptop pauses it |
| ☁️ Cloud | Runs on Anthropic's infrastructure — keeps going after you close the laptop or lock your phone |
Devices (the section with "Add device") is a separate concept from either of these — it's Remote Control: pairing your phone or another machine so it can steer a session that's actually running back on this Mac. It doesn't change where the session runs or how it's scoped; it just lets more than one screen watch and drive the same conversation.
When to start a new session vs. keep going
| Situation | Do this |
|---|---|
| Starting a genuinely new task, even in a familiar project | New session, named for the task |
| Picking the same task back up hours or days later | Resume that session — its context is still there |
| Pivoting to something unrelated mid-conversation | /clear if you're staying, or just start fresh — don't just keep typing |
| Need to research or explore without cluttering the main thread | A subagent — its findings come back as a summary, the digging doesn't |
| Something that should outlive this one conversation (a preference, a fact, a decision) | Memory — not "keeping the session open so it remembers" |
The one-sentence test: "Could I name this session for the one thing it's doing?" If the honest name is a project folder —
! Main, General Coding — it's a holding tank. If it's a sentence — Systems folder: Tailscale routing + workbench build — it's scoped right. (This very conversation drifted from a git-connector question into a folder reorg, a live-server build, and now this document — a real, lived-in example of exactly the pattern this page is about.)Page 2 — Terms sheet
The words you'll hit using the app day to day, one line each.
| Term | Plain meaning |
|---|---|
| Session | One conversation, one context window, tied to a working directory |
| Context window | Everything the model can currently "see" from this conversation — it has a limit, and fills up faster when a session covers many unrelated things |
| Compaction | Automatic summarizing of older parts of a long conversation so it can keep going past the context limit — lossy by nature, another reason not to let one session run forever across unrelated work |
/clear | Wipe the current session's context and start clean, same window |
| Subagent | A sub-conversation spun off to do research or a contained task; only its summary returns to the main session |
| Memory (auto memory) | Facts, preferences, and project context saved outside any one session, so a brand-new session can still know them — this is the actual fix for "I need it to remember," not a long-lived session |
| Agent View / session list | The sidebar or claude agents view listing every session, grouped by status — the "kanban board" you were looking for |
| Working directory | The project folder a session is rooted in — sets what files it can see by default, not what topic it's limited to |
| Local session | Runs on your Mac; laptop icon; pauses when the laptop sleeps or closes |
| Cloud / background session | Runs on Anthropic's infrastructure; cloud icon; keeps running after you close the laptop |
| Devices / Remote Control | Pairing a phone or browser to watch and steer a session running elsewhere — access, not execution location |
| Resume | Reopen a past session with its full context intact, to keep working the same thread |
| Archive | Take a session out of the active list without deleting it — for done-done, or parked-for-now |
| Kitchen sink session | The documented anti-pattern this whole page is about: one session carrying many unrelated chunks of work |
| Slash command | A typed shortcut like /clear or /loop that triggers a built-in behavior instead of a normal message |
| Hook | A rule that runs a shell command automatically on some event (a tool call, a stop) — a terminal/config-level concept, not something the app surfaces directly |
| MCP server / connector | An external tool or data source (Gmail, Calendar, a database) wired in so Claude can use it inside a session |
Claude Code Sessions Primer · @ Research/@ Building · v1 · Sep 12, 2026 · Session-state and scoping guidance is from Anthropic's official Claude Code documentation (agent-view, desktop, mobile, remote-control, best-practices); the exact automatic triggers behind the mobile app's five-state grouping aren't fully documented publicly — cross-check the live labels in-app if they ever drift from this sheet.