[keirsalterego]

Identra's one claim is that an agent opens already holding the project, because the facts arrive in the MCP initialize handshake rather than through a tool the agent has to choose to call. That is the only thing here a competitor cannot match by writing a better tool description.

Until now it happened entirely out of sight. The handshake is between an agent's CLI and the bus; nothing about it reached the window.

The canvas covered for that by accident — there was always something to look at. The three-column shell removed the last of it, which means the shell as it shipped is a build where the differentiator is invisible by construction. A user has no way to tell "it works" from "it silently does nothing". Neither do I.

The receipt

connect_block now returns the block and the number of facts written into it — after the near-duplicate collapse and after the byte cap stopped the loop, since counting rows read out of the store would report a number nobody received. initialize records it against the node that connected.

The sidebar reads the most recent one under the workspace name:

Sent 7 facts to Claude
2m ago

Every handshake this session is on hover.

It says sent. It has to keep saying sent.

The initialize response goes to the agent and never comes back to us. Over ACP it is not observable even in principle — the protocol does not return the server's initialize response to the client at all (#37 established this).

"Knows 7 facts" reads better and is a claim nobody measured. The rule is written into the doc comment on Handshake and on the Tauri command, where the next person to touch this will read it before they improve the wording.

Zero is shown, not hidden

That is the second test. "Connected, and there was nothing to tell it" and "has not connected" look identical to a person, and only one of them means this works. So the receipt is a count, never a flag.

Scope

The receipt lives and dies with the process. That is right, not a shortcut: it describes live sessions, and a count restored from disk would be a claim about an agent that is no longer running.

cargo fmt, clippy --all-targets, 10 test suites, tsc, bun test and the frontend build are clean.

[Copilot]

Pull request overview

This PR makes the MCP initialize handshake observable in the desktop shell by recording how many workspace facts were sent to each connecting agent and surfacing that “receipt” in the sidebar UI.

Changes:

• Update the MCP server handshake path to return (instructions, facts_sent) and record per-node handshake receipts in-memory.
• Expose handshake receipts to the desktop UI via a new Tauri command and frontend API wrapper.
• Render a “Sent N facts … / Xm ago” receipt under the workspace name, with per-session handshake history on hover.

Reviewed changes

Copilot reviewed 5 out of 5 changed files in this pull request and generated 1 comment.

Show a summary per file

File	Description
crates/identra-mcp/src/server.rs	Return and record a “facts sent” count during initialize; add in-memory handshake receipt tracking and tests.
apps/identra-desktop/src-tauri/src/lib.rs	Add a Tauri command to fetch handshake receipts from the bus and register it.
apps/identra-desktop/frontend/src/api.ts	Add Handshake type and busHandshakes() invoke wrapper.
apps/identra-desktop/frontend/src/App.tsx	Poll handshake receipts and display the latest receipt + hover history in the sidebar.
apps/identra-desktop/frontend/src/styles.css	Add styling for the sidebar handshake receipt line.