Thinking line fell back to the status bar

You enabled the thinking line or the chat banner, and the line is showing in the status bar instead. That is the fail-safe doing its job, not a bug - here is what happened and what, if anything, to do.

Why it happens

The webview surfaces modify two files inside Claude Code, so they only activate when the files on disk byte-for-byte hash-match a recipe Awaitful can stand behind: one verified by the fleet, the one shipped with the extension, or - on a brand-new build - a provisional one derived locally and labelled provisional in the panel. When the bytes match nothing it can verify - a foreign modification, a failed health check, no pristine copy to fall back on - Awaitful does not force it. It leaves your editor untouched, or rolls the change back, and earns from the status bar, which is always available.

What happens next

Recipes are confirmed by fleet consensus: a patch for a new build rolls out broadly only after multiple machines have applied it cleanly. Once a recipe for your build is available, Awaitful re-applies your chosen surface automatically - there is nothing you need to do, and you keep earning meanwhile, at the status bar's lower rate rather than your chosen surface's (see What counts as an impression - the rule itself is the same on every surface).

If you want to see the state

The panel names the state rather than shrugging: applied, waiting on a verified recipe, held by another tool, changed by something it cannot identify, or applied but not yet confirmed on screen. Each says what happened and what to do about it. A surface is never described as working just because the file was patched - if nothing confirms a line on screen across several thinking turns, earning moves back to the status bar and the card tells you.

When another tool holds the same files, Awaitful yields rather than fight inside your editor. It will reclaim the surface a bounded number of times per build, and that budget survives window reloads - a tool that rewrites the file every time you reload would otherwise get a fresh budget forever, and the two would trade multi-megabyte writes indefinitely. Once the budget is spent Awaitful stops and tells you which tool to turn off. It never disables or edits another extension: only you can do that. The full engineering, including backups, atomic writes and rollback, is in Your editor never breaks.

If you decide you prefer the status bar

That is a fine place to land: it is the surface that modifies nothing. Switch your choice any time in Choose where the line appears, and if you want the patch undone entirely, "Restore original files" in the panel reverts everything - see Turning it off.