desktop: delete AgentStatus.restartRequired — nothing could ever read it

[VickyXAI]

Closes #377.

The field was write-only

Five adapters wrote AgentStatus.restartRequired, five demo entries mirrored it, and nothing read it — not App.tsx, not anything under electron/. Its only effect was to look consumable.

And it wasn't. codex.ts:31 and openclaw.ts:33 set it to a constant function of configured, so it was permanently true from the moment the agent connected. What it encoded is a category — "this kind of agent needs a restart when you change it" — which activation already encodes and activationLabel already renders as "Restart gateway after changes" / "Restart app after changes".

That gap is not theoretical. A reviewer suggestion on #367 was to branch healthLabel on it; applied, it would have pinned Codex and OpenClaw to a permanent "Restart pending" pill — strictly worse than the "Connected" it replaced. @ramioca hit the same flag from the other side in #371's notes.

Why no adapter can fill it in honestly

Nothing observes whether an agent process has picked a config change up. Desktop knows when it wrote the file; it does not know when the agent last started, and for a CLI invoked per session there is no such moment to compare against. #371 resolved the two cases that were resolvable — Hermes by proving no restart is ever needed, the chain switch by doing the restart. Codex and OpenClaw are what's left, and neither is fixable that way because Desktop doesn't own those processes.

A field that cannot be computed shouldn't exist. types.ts now carries that reasoning where the field used to be, so re-adding it means reading the argument first.

What is deliberately untouched

WalletMutationResult.restartRequired and PaymentChainSwitchResult.restartRequired. There it is a genuine state — Desktop has just written the config itself and knows whether it also restarted the thing that reads it. manager.test.ts pins that behaviour and still passes.

Verification

tsc --noEmit clean, 46 tests pass, vite build and the esbuild electron build clean. Net −13/+7 lines.

Landing order

Branched off main. #371 touches hermes.ts and #367 touches api.ts on lines this deletes, so land this after both — the rebase is trivial (the lines it wants are gone either way), but taken first it'll conflict with them.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

https://claude.ai/code/session_015mUab3xrLHNpYqVHJLgJHL

Summary by CodeRabbit

• Changes
  • Removed the restart-required indicator from agent status information.
  • Agent status continues to report configuration and activation details.
  • Updated demo agent statuses to match the streamlined status information.
  • Updated the Hermes demo status to use immediate activation.

[coderabbitai]

No actionable comments were generated in the recent review. 🎉

ℹ️ Recent review info

⚙️ Run configuration

Configuration used: Path: .coderabbit.yaml

Review profile: CHILL

Plan: Advanced

Run ID: fcad0b6b-c195-446d-917f-2bbb8a627077

📥 Commits

Reviewing files that changed from the base of the PR and between cc03a54 and 5d994cd.

📒 Files selected for processing (2)

• apps/desktop/electron/adapters/hermes.ts
• apps/desktop/src/api.ts

Included review availability: Your plan provides up to 8 included reviews per hour; 7 remain after this review.

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📝 Walkthrough

Walkthrough

Changes

Agent status cleanup

Layer / File(s)	Summary
Remove restartRequired from the status contract apps/desktop/electron/core/types.ts, apps/desktop/electron/adapters/shared.ts	AgentStatus and statusShape no longer define or return restartRequired.
Update adapter and demo status responses apps/desktop/electron/adapters/*.ts, apps/desktop/src/api.ts	The five adapters and five demo agent responses no longer include restartRequired. The Hermes demo now uses immediate activation.

Estimated code review effort: 2 (Simple) | ~10 minutes

Severity of issue fixed: Medium

Suggested reviewers: killerqueen-z, ramioca

Merge Risk: ⚪ Minimal · up to 5d994

Agent status no longer exposes a misleading restart-pending flag, while activation guidance remains available. No current merge-blocking risk is identified.

🚥 Pre-merge checks | ✅ 5

✅ Passed checks (5 passed)

Check name	Status	Explanation
Description Check	✅ Passed	Check skipped - CodeRabbit’s high-level summary is enabled.
Title check	✅ Passed	The title clearly and concisely describes the primary change: removing the write-only AgentStatus.restartRequired field.
Linked Issues check	✅ Passed	The changes satisfy issue #377 by removing AgentStatus.restartRequired from the type, shared status construction, adapters, and demo data. The PR preserves restartRequired on action result types and r…
Out of Scope Changes check	✅ Passed	The changes remain within issue #377. The Hermes activation update supports the same objective by representing that Hermes does not require a restart. No unrelated code changes are present.
Docstring Coverage	✅ Passed	No functions found in the changed files to evaluate docstring coverage. Skipping docstring coverage check. Docstring coverage is scoped to functions touched by this diff. Analyzed 0 functions across 1…

✨ Finishing Touches

📝 Generate docstrings

• Create stacked PR
• Commit on current branch

🧪 Generate unit tests (beta)

• Create PR with unit tests
• Commit unit tests in branch fix/377-restart-required

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