Attaching a file, folder, or link works like a picker, not a syntax

[OutThisLife]

Attaching a file, folder, or link in the composer made you maintain its syntax by hand. @folder: sat in the editor as raw text, Tab dropped the part of it that mattered, Backspace nibbled back out one character at a time, and a pasted link doubled the directive so the message you sent had @url: printed next to the chip. Once picked, the same reference then went by three different names and wore a different style depending on which surface you met it on.

It's one bug class with one root: the @kind: prefix was never modeled. detectTrigger returned the whole token as one opaque query, so every consumer either re-parsed the prefix or dropped it, and every surface derived its own label and colour downstream. This splits the token into a scope and a value at the source, then makes one table the single answer to what a reference looks like.

Each row below was reproduced against the real hook before the change and is covered by a test after it:

Action	Before	After
@folder:apps/deskt + Tab	@apps/desktop/ — scope dropped, next completion silently widened back to files	@folder:apps/desktop/ — still browsing folders
Enter after that	chip re-guessed folder from a trailing slash	chip takes the kind it was browsing
Backspace at @folder:	nibbled out through :, r, e, d… one character per keypress	drops the whole scope in one key, mirroring Tab's one-key descent
Pick mid-message	chopped the trailing prose off and stranded folder: in front of the chip	chip lands at the caret, prose either side intact
Paste a link into @url:	sent @url:@url:`https://…` — the directive doubled	the open scope is consumed; one chip
Pick a folder	popover said desktop/, editor said apps/desktop/, chip said desktop	one label, derived once, on all three
/ menu rows	no icons, a separate stacked layout	same row as @, icon from the shared table
Walk a tree	every keystroke an uncached round trip behind a 60ms debounce	repeat paths served from cache, no debounce, no spinner

Tab now carries the scope down, Backspace drops it as one unit, and the rebuild fallback splits around the caret instead of slicing tokenLength off the end of the draft — that end-slice assumed the trigger was the last thing in the editor, which is why mid-message picks ate the rest of the line. With the syntax out of the editor, the popover carries the filter as a FOLDERS / FILES / LINKS header, reusing the group-header style the slash menu already renders.

@ and / stop being two menus that happen to share a file. One table maps every kind a reference can be — file, folder, url, image, tool, line, terminal, session, git, diff, staged, command, skill, theme, emoji — to its glyph and section label, and the accent for each lives in the stylesheet keyed on data-ref, so no colour ships from a component and a skin restyles all of them at once. A row now looks like the chip it will become. Chips lose their pill in the process: a filled badge turns every mention into a UI element the eye has to step over, and the icon plus accent already say what kind of thing it is.

The @ path also picks up the completion cache / has had since the skills work. Measured in-process against this repo (8,059 files): git ls-files ~38ms, ranking ~12ms per keystroke. It now reuses the existing cache module with a 15s TTL — a directory listing, unlike the command catalog, can change under the user — keyed on cwd + session + query, with isCached wired so a warm query skips both the debounce and the loading state. That last part is what makes walking a tree feel instant rather than merely fast; a spinner over an answer already in hand reads as latency you aren't paying.

Two guards worth calling out: only the six known kinds become scopes, so @teknium1: and @localhost:8080 stay ordinary text; and the caret-split helper is shared across the commit path, the ascend path, and the edit composer instead of being hand-rolled three times (the edit composer duplicates the trigger machinery and had the same end-slicing bug).

This is the raw-contenteditable version of what upstream assistant-ui does in Lexical: TriggerPopoverCategories / TriggerPopoverBack model a scope as navigable state with a Back affordance, never as text in the buffer, and DirectiveNode.__label keeps one label on the node that every consumer renders verbatim.

530 tests across the composer and assistant-ui suites, all passing.

[github-actions]

૮ >ﻌ< ა ci review

_{ran on c999dc2}

ℹ️ Info

Desktop E2E visual evidence · View test artifacts · View job

1 visual diff.

_{inline evidence is publishing...}