How Nightdesk pairs a pane with a session

When you launch a session, the terminal pane exists before Nightdesk knows which session is running in it. Pairing is the moment those two become one thing, and it is quick enough that you will usually see only its result.

What you see

A provisional row reading starting… stands on the rail, named for the checkout you launched in. It holds that place until the session announces itself.

Once it does, the pane moves to that session’s own card, where the agent now has a real row with its name, status and model. The pane’s Restart becomes that session’s restart, because the pane is no longer a terminal that happens to be running something — it is that agent.

If the session never announces itself, the starting row stays. The session is running and the pane is still a terminal you can work in, but Nightdesk never joins the two: the pane does not move to the session’s card, and the session’s row carries no profile chip — pairing is what records which account a session ran as, so attaching to it later resumes it on your default account instead of the profile you launched it with.

Codex sessions outlive their panes

A Codex session running under the daemon keeps going when you quit Codex in its pane: the thread stays loaded and running without a pane in front of it. Attaching to a Codex row resumes through the daemon that holds it, rather than opening the same conversation a second time in a second harness.