On wide screens, with a chat open, two text boxes with near-identical coral send buttons sit at the same eye level — the sidebar convene box (starts a brand-new panel) and the chat reply box (messages the current panel). Nothing says which is which, so you can fire a new panel when you meant to reply. Below: the problem, then two ways to fix it.
Both composers are a coral round button on a pale field; only the glyph differs (3-head panel vs. send-arrow), which nobody parses at a glance. Click either composer in the frame to see what it would actually fire.
wide · a chat is open
With a chat open, the convene box recedes to a quiet ghost pill — one text box invites typing (the reply), the other is clearly a "start something new" button. On the landing (no chat open) it stays the full hero prompt. Click the pill to see it expand back to the convene prompt.
wide · a chat is open — convene collapsed
One active input at a time. The pill reuses the shipped 3-head convene glyph + a “New panel”
kicker, so it reads as a discrete action — never a second reply box. Driven by the existing
body.chat-open flag (already set on wide).
Keep both boxes always visible, but make them impossible to confuse: the convene box gets a NEW PANEL kicker, a goal-shaped placeholder, and a ghost (outline) 3-head button — while the chat Send stays the only filled-coral arrow. One CSS block; you can still mis-type into it, but the cue is loud.
wide · a chat is open — convene desymmetrized
Filled coral = “reply, the primary action.” Outline = “start new.” Different shape, label, and placeholder — the two no longer rhyme.
Go with A — collapse. It fixes the ambiguity at the root: with a chat open there is only ever one place to type, and the convene action reads as “start something new,” not “reply here.” The hero convene prompt still owns the landing, where it should.
One thing to reconcile first: there’s already a ＋ New affordance at the top of the chats list, so
with A’s collapsed pill the sidebar would carry two “new panel” entry points. I’d unify them —
either the top ＋ New opens the convene prompt (and drop the bottom pill), or keep the bottom
pill as the describe-a-situation hot-start and make the top ＋ New the hand-pick (cold) path,
clearly labeled. Pick one story.
B is the cheap fallback if you’d rather not add the collapse state — one CSS block, no JS — but it leaves two text boxes on screen, so the mis-type is still possible, just unlikely.
Light/dark only here, on purpose — this mocks the room surface, which ships no e-ink.