[teamleaderleo]

While you dictate into the agent chat composer (or the New Tab field), it now looks like Claude's (Leo's Claude Code reference, 2026-10-20). The empty prompt says Listening… in italic, muted. Words stream into the field as they're heard. Before the mic, in the same row, you get a waveform of thin bars that follows the mic level and fades to dots at both ends, then a finish key (the Return glyph) that ends dictation and keeps the text. The mic itself stays a mic, lit as an accent-tinted rounded square. Clicking it again still stops. Before this change, the mic turned into a small red level meter and there was no placeholder or finish control.

Mechanism (webview only; Chief's native composer is another PR):

• dictation.ts keeps the level history at 11 samples for the wave. It also keeps a page-wide "starting or listening" flag (useDictationListening), fed by the same deliverDictation bridge, and adds Dictation.finish() → dictation.stop (the host's stop keeps the words; Esc's dictation.cancel still drops them).
• DictationListening.tsx is new: DictationWave (bars whose --level sets their height, a sine taper so the middle rises most, three resting dots each end) and DictationFinishButton (disabled while finalizing). DictationMic renders wave, finish key and mic inside the same HideableChrome / fit slot. So the hidden-mic setting hides all three, and the narrow-row rule that keeps a pressed mic in the row keeps them too. DictationLevelMeter.tsx is gone.
• Composer.tsx (+5 lines) and NewTabScreen.tsx swap the placeholder for dictation.listening while the flag is on and mark the field (is-dictating / data-dictation-listening) for the italic.
• dictation.css (new): the lit mic uses --cmux-accent, which falls back to --agent-accent and then the text color. No hard-coded blue; it's neutral in a theme without an accent. The wave's height transition is inside prefers-reduced-motion: no-preference, and the pane's data-agent-motion="off" stops it, so with motion off each level applies at once. The red listening rules in styles.css / composerStates.css are removed, and the two hover/focus pill exclusions in composerLocation.css now also cover starting.
• Live text: the native side already sends the whole text so far on every update (AgentPaneDictation.payload), and useDictation splices each one. A test now checks that partials land before the session ends; no fix was needed.
• Strings dictation.listening and dictation.finish are in all 21 locales of the agent pane catalog: English translated, the rest machine translations marked needs_review.

Kept as before: agentPane.showDictation hide/show, Esc cancel, the Toggle Dictation shortcut and hold-to-talk (native), and aria-label / aria-pressed / aria-busy on the mic.

Gallery: agent-pane.dictation (component) gains starting, finish, and a realistic listening level history. The new agent-pane.composer-dictation drives the chat's real composer through cmuxAcpmuxBridge.dictation with these variants: idle, listening-empty, listening-words and finalizing. That entry is in its own file, away from composer.gallery.ts, which #22667 is editing.

Risk: normal (webview UI, no protocol or native change).

Changelog

Changed: Dictation in the agent composer looks like Claude's: "Listening…" in the empty prompt, a live waveform, a finish key that keeps your words, and a lit mic.

Test

• webviews/test/new-tab-dictation.test.tsx, 3 new tests: the "Listening…" placeholder shows only while waiting with no words, and partial words stream in live; the mic is pressed and lit beside the wave and finish key, and idle shows the mic alone; the finish key calls dictation.stop (never cancel) and the words stay.
• DictationButton.test.tsx: the mic keeps its glyph while listening; the finish key calls finish() and is disabled while finalizing.
• Red: commit 1f55ac4 (tests only). Green: 67f86ea. Fleet: cmux-ci run --class isolated --script scripts/ci/run-webviews-tests.sh --ref <sha> (results below).

Observed / Not run

• Fleet, scripts/ci/run-webviews-tests.sh (whole webviews suite, light class): red 1f55ac4 (step 95f12af47f30af7bd9e9e850) fails the 3 new tests in new-tab-dictation.test.tsx. Green 67f86ea (step ed1107d150f2f73e803d8f41) passes new-tab-dictation.test.tsx and DictationButton.test.tsx. The same 9 other files fail in both runs (gallery-coverage on ChatHeaderInlineStatus, hover-row-sweep, stats-page, tooltip-surface, whats-new-text-selection, agent-pane-column-edges, apps-flow, composer-html-paste-edit, thread-minimap-feel), so those are base failures.

• The first green run (c145e8b) failed while building the bundles: build-agent-pane-web.sh didn't ship the new dictation.css. Fixed in 67f86ea, which adds it after the composer sheets.

• Locally: bunx vp check --no-fmt (lint + types: 0 errors), vp fmt on the changed files, prepush-gate.py (no new violations). scripts/web-lint.sh fails only on a base react-hooks/exhaustive-deps warning at Composer.tsx:461, outside this diff, so I pushed with CMUX_WEB_LINT_SKIP_REASON.

• Not run: no local build or browser; screenshots come from the gallery advisory run. Not checked in the real app: the italic placeholder, the accent tint per theme, the wave's motion, and the narrow-row fit with the wave present.

Agent session: cosmic-gray
🤖 Generated with Claude Code

[github-actions]

cmux status _{(one comment, edited in place; each line is updated by the job that owns it)}

Review 67f86ea: HQ feed card · gallery before/after runs · checks

App of this head (app.zip, kept 1 day)

gh workflow run reload-build.yml -R manaflow-ai/cmux --ref feat-cmux-next -f tag=pr22713 -f ref=feat-cmux-next-composer-dictation-look -f platform=macos -f backend_mode=local

Unclear: web / react-apps-check failed: no known signature; failed step: Check webview test shards. This PR merged before its CI finished: fix forward on main.

CI failed on 67f86eab2b (run 39524247268 attempt 1): 1 code, 1 unknown.

Job	Verdict	Why
web / react-apps-check (1)	code	a web test failed
web / react-apps-check	unknown	no known signature; failed step: Check webview test shards

Failures:

• seen on other PRs agent-pane-background-tasks.test.ts clicking a background task's end opens its terminal beside the chat: failed (job)

Matched log lines

web / react-apps-check (1): (fail) clicking a background task's end opens its terminal beside the chat [926.65ms]

Not re-run automatically: web / react-apps-check (1), web / react-apps-check are not machine failures.

Written by scripts/ci/classify_failures.py (ci-failure-attribution.yml); signatures are its SIGNATURES table. A machine verdict is the runner's fault, not this PR's; yours means the failing file is one this PR changes, also red on main that main's latest full suite fails the same way, seen on other PRs that it failed on another pull request's run lately.

red: web / Web status; NEW: green on the base b8314d7; do not merge until green; see lane-rules
red: web / react-apps-check; no finished base run on b8314d7 to compare; do not merge until green; see lane-rules
red: web / react-apps-check (1); no finished base run on b8314d7 to compare; do not merge until green; see lane-rules

[teamleaderleo]

Bead cx-x3v88 created for this PR by the cmux coordinator.

[blacksmith-sh]

Found 2 test failures on Blacksmith runners:

Failures

Test	View Logs
test/agent-pane-background-tasks.test.ts/agent-pane-background-tasks.test	View Logs
test/agent-pane-background-tasks.test.ts/agent-pane-background-tasks.test	View Logs

^{Need help on this PR? Tag @codesmith-bot with what you need.}

[github-actions]

Shipped in:

• cmux NEXT nightly 1.0.0-nightly.3953592002001 (f3ecea5132)
• cmux NEXT nightly 1.0.0-nightly.3953614980201 (ff8d849c4c)