MCP Agents — the projects table, beneath what ships today

The pane above the divider is the shipped one, structure unchanged. The table is added underneath: the connection is set up once, the projects list is what you come back to check.

20 Aug 2026 · drawn at the shipped 660pt · every string below is either a shipped key or a marked change — the mockup is the spec

The empty state

The pane lists only projects that have Agent Access on — so a researcher who has never turned it on sees nothing, and this is the one moment the audit surface has to point at the management surface.

Strings — shipped, changed, new

• The payload region is no longer pinned, and the window follows it. It was a fixed 170pt so switching client tabs could never reflow the pane — free while the payload was the last thing in the window, since dead space at the bottom is invisible. The register made it a chasm through the middle: the Claude Desktop tab needs ~150pt less than the tallest one. The package's own mechanism replaces it — setWindowFrame sizes the window from view.fittingSize, and an unpinned payload is what makes that size honest. Because the package runs it only on tab activation, SettingsWindow.refitToContent() performs the same arithmetic when the client picker or the register changes shape underneath it. (21 Aug 2026.)
• Nine rows, then scroll — the table is bounded, and it has to be. The Settings package sizes each pane to fittingSize and animates the window to match, so an unbounded table makes the window grow with the project count: fine at four rows, a window taller than the display at twenty-five. 342px holds nine rows plus both group headers. Nine because the common case should never scroll — past that the sticky headers, which were drawn before anything could scroll under them, finally do the job they were drawn for. It is a maximum, not a height — fewer than nine rows and the table is as tall as its rows, so the pane reports a smaller fittingSize and the Settings package sizes the window to it. Precisely: the package calls setWindowFrame from two places only, both tab activation (measured 21 Aug 2026), so the shrink happens every time you arrive at the pane and not live while you are looking at it — a row appearing or disappearing under your eyes compresses rather than resizes. That does not weaken the rule: a clamped greedy ScrollView would report 342pt for two rows at activation too, so the pane would open tall and empty every single time. The switch pays for itself at the only moment the package measures anything. Watch this in the build: SwiftUI's ScrollView is greedy along its scroll axis, so ScrollView { rows }.frame(maxHeight: 342) claims all 342pt even for two rows and the shrink never happens. Switch on the row count instead — nine or fewer renders a plain VStack with no scroller at all, more than nine renders the bounded one. The count is known before layout, so this needs no measurement, same reasoning as the Sessions grid being container queries rather than JS width-switching. This is also what keeps the pane's geometry rule intact: the fixed 170pt payload holds only the client tabs, hint and install row, so switching Claude Desktop → Claude Code reflows inside that region and the table below never moves.
• The Anonymise sub-label forks a shared string, and that is the one decision in this table that costs something. MCPAgentsSettingsView.swift:153 deliberately reuses the Export strings — the comment reads "Same strings as Export: one word for one concept." "Agents see speaker codes" is truer here (it names the result in this context rather than the action), but it needs a new key in 21 locales and it means the concept has two hints. The label itself stays Anonymise — I had invented "Hide names", which was not a shipped string and should not have been drawn.
• Off projects are not listed, and that is the scope, not a gap. The register is what you have shared or might be sharing — an off project is neither, so it is out of scope by definition rather than missing from a set it belongs to. This is a risk register, not primarily a control surface: granting happens in the sidebar, where the project lives. Settled 20 Aug 2026 — do not relitigate. (The comparison that invites reopening it — System Settings ▸ Privacy, Safari ▸ Extensions and Little Snitch all enumerate the governed set including the off ones — is the wrong comparison: those are control surfaces, and this one is deliberately not.)
• The Windows column is gone. It was perfectly determined by the group header — every Active row was ≥1, every Available row 0 — and a column redundant with the sort is the textbook tell for a list wearing columns. The sort is the explanation.
• A checkbox, because ticked-state is readable at a glance — which is the whole job of a register. It is genuinely two-way for rows already in the register: untick to revoke, re-tick to undo, within the session. That is not a control surface, it is an undo, and it means the control does exactly what a checkbox promises rather than being a one-way act wearing a toggle.
• No confirmation, because revoke fails safe. An accidental revoke costs a trip to the sidebar; an accidental grant costs exposure. Asymmetric consequences justify asymmetric protection, so the safe direction gets one click and no dialog — a confirmation here would protect the thing that did not need protecting and train people to dismiss sheets.
• The row does not vanish — it becomes a receipt. A disappearing row on a project reads as "removed the project", and the sidebar has a real Remove from Sidebar act for it to be confused with. So the row stays for the session, dimmed, with its checkbox unticked — a log line you can still reverse. It is absent next time the pane opens. This answers "what did I just do?" without reintroducing a two-way toggle — to restore, you go to the sidebar, where grant lives.
• There is no project subtitle, so nothing goes under the name. Project carries no description or study-type field — the sidebar's second line shows state, never prose. Rows are single-line, uniform height, and the one real window fact that needs saying ("minimised", which explains an Active row you cannot see) rides as a dimmed suffix.
• It is not irreversible, and it must not imply that it is. Unlike cancelling a download, Agent Access can be turned back on. So the tooltip and accessibility label are the shipped verb — menu.project.turnOffAgentAccess, "Turn Off Agent Access" — the same words the sidebar's menu item uses. One grammar, two renderings, no new string, and gruber's two-grammars objection disappears.
• Access leads, and it is headed. Two earlier bullets here described the opposite — a checkbox dropped from the columns, the control moved to the trailing edge — and were residue from an iteration this drawing already replaced. They were removed on 21 Aug 2026 while building, because a legend that contradicts its own drawing sends the reader to argue with the picture. The reason the column is headed rather than a bare tick strip is unchanged and is in the strings table: unheaded, it reads as the cloud-import grid's batch-selection column. Everything shares one left edge — section header, column header and row content all at 20px.
• The table earns being a table. Access, Project, Sessions, Last asked — four columns, none of them determined by the grouping. The two that were (Windows, then the antenna) are gone; that test is what convicted them, and Access survives it because a row's tick genuinely varies within a group.
• The pane is the audit surface; the sidebar is the management surface. Revoke is available wherever exposure is visible; grant lives in one place. That asymmetry is deliberate — you can always reduce what is exposed from where you are looking, but increasing it takes a deliberate act in the surface that owns the project. It is also the division design-mcp-extension.md:1746 already settled on 1 Aug: the context menu is the act, the antenna is the audit. A two-way checkbox would have flattened it, forced every project into this table, and rebuilt the sidebar under the install instructions.
• The empty state is the one place the audit surface points at the management surface — necessarily, since a researcher who has never granted access has nothing here to act on.
• "Last asked", not "Reading now". MCP is request/response — there is no continuous reading state to report, and the app's own rule is we can offer, we cannot observe. The shipped sibling string is already careful for the same reason: "An agent has asked about this project recently." A past-tense fact is the only honest one available.
• The antenna column is gone, by my own argument. Every visible row is ticked, so a solid antenna meant "in the Active group" and a pale one meant "in the Available group" — perfectly determined by the sort, which is the same test that convicted the Windows column. Vocabulary continuity with the sidebar was its only remaining job, and that is not information.
• The plural model this needed is built. This bullet used to say "do not build this table against the current model" — exposedProject was a single designated slot, so drawing two readable projects would have been a lie. That slot was replaced by HandshakeExposure on 20 Aug 2026, hours after this was drawn: scope is derived from the window roster and the file carries a row per project. The table reads the same two predicates the handshake does — WindowRoster.shownProjects for the group, Project.agentAccess for the tick — so a header here cannot disagree with what an agent can reach.
• "Active" collides three ways in this codebase — agentActiveNow and mcp.active mean an agent asked recently, and PipelineState has its own. Here it means a window is open. The name is fixed; the collision is worth knowing when the code is written. Related: state the predicate exactly — serves are lazy, so a window can exist with no serve behind it.
• No filter field. A filter says "this list will be long" about a list that isn't. It earns its place in the cloud-import grid, which spans weeks of meetings; here it would be furniture.
• Keyboard and VoiceOver — what was specified, and what shipped (21 Aug 2026). The spec asked for selectable rows, arrows between them, Space on the focused row. Built: each row's checkbox is focusable and Space toggles it; there is no selection model and no arrow navigation. The honest cost: Tab only reaches checkboxes when System Settings ▸ Keyboard ▸ Keyboard navigation is on, and it is off by default — and this pane has no text fields, so on a stock Mac Tab does nothing here. Arrow traversal is what Table would have given free, and is the strongest argument against the hand-built table; it lost to the pane-shrink behaviour, which Table cannot provide because it has no intrinsic height. What was bought back instead: a composed per-row accessibility label (AgentProjectRegister.accessibilityLabel, commas not middots, carrying name + group + sessions + last-asked), the glyph hidden, and the full cell as the checkbox's hit area. Revisit if a cohort tester reaches for the arrows.

Resolved: the sidebar's context menu uses a verb swap ("Turn On / Turn Off Agent Access") and this table uses a checkbox — that is not two grammars for one act, it is being native to each context. macOS context menus carry verbs; AppKit table views carry checkboxes. The shipped verb still supplies the checkbox's tooltip and accessibility label, so the two surfaces name the same act in each surface's own idiom.