vscode: an empty window adopts $HOME as the workspace and badges unrelated held mail

[amrmelsayed]

Problem

Open the packaged IDE (codev-vscode 3.3.4) with NO folder. The extension resolves its workspace to $HOME and the status bar + activity-bar badge render Codev: 0 builders · ⚠ 25 held — 25 real held rows in Tower's mailbox scoped to workspace_path=$HOME (reason no-live-pty, newest 2026-09-04, left by an old architect session run from the home directory). The display is truthful about the database and useless to the user: the mail belongs to no project the user is looking at, and afx inbox inside any actual repo cannot see it (inbox is workspace-scoped), so the badge points at something the obvious CLI cannot show.

Corroboration from another machine-context: an unscoped Tower /api/overview probe on the same Tower reports heldCount: 25, mailboxEscalated: true — the $HOME rows dominate the global count.

Fix shape (hypothesis, for the builder to validate)

An empty window must not adopt $HOME as a Codev workspace for mailbox/badge purposes. Either:

• render no Codev mailbox state when the resolved workspace is not a Codev project (no .codev/, no codev/, or equal to the user's home dir), or
• if the count is shown at all, label it with the workspace path it belongs to ("25 held in /Users/") so it cannot read as current-project state.

Same rule for the activity-bar badge and status chip. The workspace-resolution predicate should be shared, not per-surface.

Related

• vscode: held-mail drill-in — clickable held indicator with inspect + dismiss (revisits Spec 1313 Decision 8) #1594 (held-mail drill-in) — same surfaces; a drill-in would have made this diagnosable in-editor, but the scoping defect exists independently.
• Companion tower-side filing: stale no-live-pty held rows never age out and workspace-scoped afx inbox hides other workspaces' mail — that issue covers why 3-week-old rows existed to be miscounted at all.