Board visibility

There is more work queued than anyone gets to in a day. Most of it is not wrong, or stuck, or finished — it is simply not for this afternoon. A dashboard that shows all of it equally is a dashboard you stop reading.

Board visibility is the answer: a second field on a session, entirely separate from status, whose only job is deciding whether the card is on screen.

Value	Means
visible	On the board. The default; every session starts here.
hidden	Off the board until you put it back. No end time.
snoozed	Off the board until snoozed_until, then back on its own.

It decides nothing

This is the property to internalize before anything else, because the whole feature is worthless if it is not true.

Nothing in Zimmer’s scheduling reads visibility. Not the state machine, not the spot queue, not precedence, not the quota gate, not triggers or wake-ups. A snoozed session is started, ranked, followed up on and finished at exactly the moments it would have been had nobody touched it. The only difference is that a card is not being drawn.

Setting it never starts, stops, sleeps, wakes or reorders a session. It is a single write to two presentation columns, through Sessions::SetVisibility, which is the one writer behind all three surfaces.

Snoozing a card is not sleeping a session

A snoozed session runs exactly when it would have run anyway — it is simply not on screen. Nothing in the web UI sleeps a session: that is wake_me_up_later and action_session’s pause_into_spot_queue over MCP (Triggers and schedules). Reading a snooze as a pause is how work you meant to merely tidy away looks like work you stopped, so the panel says so before you click.

A snooze ends by being read

There is no sweeper job. snoozed_until is compared against the current time on every read, and a snooze whose time has passed simply reads as visible:

scope :board_visible, ->(now = Time.current) {
  where(
    "sessions.visibility = :visible OR (sessions.visibility = :snoozed AND sessions.snoozed_until IS NOT NULL AND sessions.snoozed_until <= :now)",
    visible: VISIBLE, snoozed: SNOOZED, now: now
  )
}

Two things follow, and both are the point.

The session comes back on its own, with no request made and no row written. And there is no background writer that could ever race the lifecycle — which is what makes the orthogonality above something the design guarantees rather than something the code has to remember.

The stored choice is left alone. A session whose snooze ran out last week still reads "snoozed" in the column; it is effective_visibility that reports "visible". Read the first to know whether a snooze was ever set, the second to decide whether to draw something.

board_hidden is the exact complement, and Session#board_visible? is the row-level counterpart that must answer identically — the dashboard filters with the scope and draws badges with the predicate, and the two disagreeing would put a card on screen that the page believes is not there.

Using it

On a card. The ⋮ menu on every session card — in the category grid, the Starred group, both flat sort views and the search results — offers Snooze until… and Hide. The snooze panel holds a handful of presets (later today, tomorrow, in 3 days, this weekend, next week) and a date/time picker for anything else. The presets are computed in your browser’s timezone, so “Tomorrow” means your 9am.

In the Ranked view. The compact row’s ⋮ menu carries the same two entries and the same panel. The ranked queue is a list of work that has not started, which makes it exactly the list worth thinning out — and snoozing a row there leaves its precedence untouched, so the queue behind it does not move.

On the session page. A Snooze pill in the header; on a phone, a row in the bottom sheet.

Finding a session you hid

The dashboard’s Filters → Board visibility control has three settings: On board (the default), Snoozed & hidden, and Both. When anything is tucked away, the legend says how many, so a board that is holding cards back always says so.

Revealed cards carry a badge saying which kind of tucking-away it is and, for a snooze, when it ends — and their menu grows a Put back on the board row. Nothing is ever unrecoverable.

Over the API and MCP

Both surfaces can read, write and filter it, and both say plainly in their descriptions that it does not affect scheduling — so neither a human nor an agent mistakes it for something that controls whether work runs.

• REST — PATCH /api/v1/sessions/:id/visibility, and visibility / effective_visibility / snoozed_until on every serialized session. See Board visibility.
• MCP — action_session with action: "set_visibility", and a **Visibility:** line on quick_search_sessions and get_session results whenever a session is tucked away.

One default is deliberate and worth knowing about: agent-facing session search is unfiltered on this axis. quick_search_sessions and GET /sessions return hidden and snoozed sessions unless you explicitly pass visibility. Zimmer’s own agents call that search to check whether a piece of work already has a session; a session a human tidied off their board is still that session, and hiding it from a duplicate check would produce duplicate work with no visible cause. Human-facing boards filter by default; the machine-facing ones do not.

set_visibility is not exposed on the self-session tool group. A session tidying its own card off a human’s board is not self-management — it is editing somebody else’s view.