Present Tense, on Purpose
The previous lesson put screen checkpoints in the future: parser state, modes, resizes, paged history that survive a lock as if you had never left. That is still the next milestone. On 2026-10-06 something narrower arrived in the present, and it sits exactly on the line this track exists to guard. The phone now keeps a read shelf: the last session lists it saw, and the last complete screen of each pane you visited, so a phone with no connection still shows you something. It looks like the thing the destination promises. It is deliberately not that thing.
What the Shelf Keeps
Open the app with no link to a Mac and the session list comes from the shelf, stamped with when it was saved and saying plainly what it cannot know:
Each saved list holds at most 2,000 rows per Mac, with the limit labeled when it bites. Each visited pane can keep its last complete visible grid — dimensions, capture time, daemon incarnation, session identity, sequence, and whether it was scrolled back — forty screens per Mac, up to 64,000 characters each. Open one and it says what it is:
Saved screen · Read only. Captured with a time and a size. The new-session and Anvil buttons are greyed out. The text is selectable, because reading and copying are the whole point.
What the Shelf Refuses to Be
It is plain text: no colors, no parser state, no editable terminal. It is never fed back into the emulator and never into a PTY. Capture waits for a complete replay and stops at an output gap, and a partial replay can never overwrite the last complete saved screen. Every saved session row is stripped of writer, lease, hold and surface authority, so a cold pane is disconnected with input disabled. A fresh hello does not re-enable input by itself; the same fresh-attachment and complete-screen gates as always decide that. A changed daemon incarnation clears the old panes rather than resurrecting them under new sessions. No keystroke, create, hold or Anvil action is queued for later. Output is sampled at most every two seconds and flushed when a replay completes, a pane closes or a link drops.
Why This Belongs in the Tense Track
A reviewer who opens the phone on a train and sees a saved screen could call it a checkpoint and tick a milestone. It is not one, and the product labels make that impossible to miss: Saved, Read only, Captured, need a connection. That is Track 2's rule again, on the phone: a remembered recipe or a remembered picture is never a living process. The destination is still a reconstructed screen. The present is an honest photograph with its timestamp on it.