The plan had listed the managers’ own state files as an optional source from the start: every project manager keeps a roster of its peers and a handoff file of what is in flight and what is blocked. Until now the board showed sessions side by side with no sign of which one was directing the others. With the owner’s instruction to keep going without them, this was the first of two slices dispatched on the evening of 18 October.
Rows and ids, never text
The source polls each project folder’s roster and handoff every five seconds and keeps only the structured parts: branch names, pull request numbers, states, session ids, and the short name, role and model cells of the roster. Free text never leaves the file. A handoff written without the expected sections gives empty lists rather than an error, which mattered at once: the builder found one real project whose handoff used a different layout and would otherwise have shown the source as broken.
From those rows the collector computes Manages edges, dashed lines from a manager to each session its files name, on the graph, the mini-map, and in replay. Merged work gets no edge and appears only as a “+n merged” count. Selecting a manager opens a Dispatched section listing its open items and peers, each one a link to the session it names when that session is on screen. Remote viewers on the phone get the board without the managers block.
The folders it must not read
Claudeboard has one hard rule about the machine it runs on: it never reads inside Claude’s own configuration folder or the desktop app’s folders. The reviewer ran the new source against a live collector and found that a session started in the home folder, or a project whose folders were links pointing elsewhere, would lead it straight in. The fix checks the real path of every folder and file against the forbidden places, resolved by the operating system rather than as typed, and refuses before reading. The re-check traced every file the collector opened across five such arrangements and counted zero reads inside them.