Opt-in layout: composer at the top, thread newest-first #23032

The composer sits at the bottom of the window, so the newest output always piles up against the bottom edge. After a full day of driving agents, my eyes spend most of their time pointed at the bottom of the screen, and my back feels it. I wanted the thing I'm reading to sit near eye level instead.

I prototyped this in my fork and have been using it as my daily build. Would you consider it as an opt-in layout setting? I'm not proposing a new default.

Before / after (same thread, same moment)

Before	After

Sending a prompt, then opening and closing a work log

How it behaves

• The composer docks at the top of the chat, and the thread reads strictly newest-first. Each new item appears directly under the composer, so an answer lands above the prompt that started it, and scrolling down goes back in time. I first tried keeping each turn in question-then-answer order, but reading across turns zigzagged. Strict newest-first reads better.
• Text inside a message still reads top-down. Only the order of the items flips, the same way a feed or a top-posted email thread works.
• The composer is mirrored to match: its controls sit on top, menus and popovers open downward, and the send arrow points down.
• Collapsed work logs ("Worked for 8s") unfold upward from their header, so the chronology holds and the header stays where you clicked it.
• When you scroll back through history, a "Scroll to latest" pill appears at the top.

Scope

• Client-only. It doesn't touch contracts, the server, or provider adapters.
• Web and desktop. I haven't touched mobile.
• The work is in apps/web: timeline row order and scroll anchoring, plus the mirrored composer. The prototype sits on an older fork, so if you're open to the direction I'd reimplement it on current main behind a setting.

Prototype built with Claude Opus 5.5 in Claude Code.