quiet the conversation surface: thinking, tool previews, and weight

[kevinjosethomas]

the agent's own activity competes with its answers for attention. this PR quiets the conversation surface so the chat reads as answers first, activity second.

thinking:

• hidden by default: no "Thinking:" summary row renders while the model works; the tray working loader stays the activity signal
• ctrl+t reveals every thinking block in the conversation and hides them again, never persisted; the status line confirms each press
• the revealed trace and recap render in a dim tone under a quiet "Thinking:" label with no separator dot

tool calls:

• collapsed previews render plain and dim instead of bash green or syntax-highlighted code; expanded blocks keep full highlighting
• line counts and durations render in the same dim tone

rows:

• leading labels keep their color; trailing detail dims (agent-message participant and previews, tool command previews, counts, durations)

weight:

• 32 decorative bold sites drop to normal weight, keeping bold only where it marks state or a single critical item (selected rows, active tabs, the login verification code)

escape hatch: set hideThinkingBlock to false in settings to restore the legacy always-visible thinking traces.

validated with focused assistant-message, thinking-visibility, ipython-cell-preview, event-row-hierarchy, and bash-execution tests plus adjacent suites, and npm run check with zero warnings.

no-ticket: ui proposals tracked in https://app.notion.com/p/3d672940136f817b99a3d97c7d5fa048

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Note

Low Risk
Changelog-only diff; no runtime code changes in this patch.

Overview
Reorganizes the coding-agent .changes notes so assistant chat output styling (mdBody, prime-theme inline code) stays in ui-chat-output.md, while conversation-surface quieting moves into new ui-quiet-conversation.md.

That new note captures the UX batch this PR tracks: thinking blocks hidden by default with a keybinding to show/hide all traces (dim label/recap), collapsed tool-call previews plain and dim (expanded still highlighted), decorative bold dropped across the conversation UI except state-critical spots, and event rows where trailing metadata dims while leading labels stay colored.

^{Reviewed by Cursor Bugbot for commit 98651fa. Bugbot is set up for automated code reviews on this repo. Configure here.}

Note

Quiet conversation surface: hide thinking rows, dim tool previews, reduce decorative bold

• Hides thinking rows by default and shows them dimmed only on demand, reducing visual noise in the conversation view
• Dims collapsed tool-call previews and their metadata so they recede into the background
• Reduces decorative bold text throughout the conversation surface to lower visual weight
• Dims trailing event-row details while preserving leading-label colors for readability
• Changes prime-theme inline-code color to #c8c8cd so code snippets blend more quietly into the conversation
• Behavioral Change: thinking rows that were previously visible are now hidden by default; users must opt in to see them

^{Macroscope summarized 98651fa.}

[kevinjosethomas]

Folded back into #2193 at Kevin's call — the pitch separation isn't needed. All the quiet-conversation changes (hidden thinking with Ctrl+T reveal, dim tool previews, bold reduction, row hierarchy) now ride in the chat output PR as one reviewable unit. No code was lost; the preview build is unaffected (it already contained this tree).