🌈 feat(notes): tint inline notes per agent author

[sdougbrown]

Summary

Tint inline agent notes per author so reviews with multiple agents are visually distinct at a glance. The author name in the title bar (added in the linked PR) tells the reviewer which agent wrote a note; this PR makes that distinction readable without reading the label, by giving each agent a stable colour across the diff.

I personally want this because I'm doing crazy agent orchestration for laughs and I'd like to know which agent is saying what.

Implementation:

• New per-theme noteAccentPalette on themes.ts (five accents per appearance) tuned for dark + light themes.
• New src/ui/lib/agentColor.ts resolves an annotation's author to a stable palette slot via FNV-1a hash, then derives:
  • the border accent for the inline note frame (top/sides/bottom + the title row's right-edge bar)
  • the guide-cap accent for the ╵ glyph below a multi-row annotation range
  • the body and title backgrounds, computed in HSL with low saturation + theme-appropriate lightness so theme.text / theme.muted body copy stays legible.
• The cap accent threads through the planned note-guide-cap row in reviewRenderPlan.ts and resolves in PierreDiffView.tsx. First-author-wins when two notes share a row+side.
• Background tint falls back to theme.noteBackground / theme.noteTitleBackground whenever no author is set, palette resolution returns null, or accent parsing fails. Unauthored notes also keep theme.noteBorder.
• Demo update: spread 3-agent-review-demo across all five accent slots (llama, grok, phi, gemini, sonnet) so one screenshot captures the full palette.

Tests include contrast-ratio assertions against theme.text for both palettes, so accidentally introducing an illegible accent fails CI.

Screenshot

Verified

• bun run typecheck
• bun run lint
• bun test — same baseline failures as upstream/main, no new failures. +21 net passing tests from the new colour/render-plan/ui suites.
• bun run test:integration (PTY)
• bun run test:tty-smoke
• Manual TTY smoke on examples/3-agent-review-demo/change.patch with --agent-context examples/3-agent-review-demo/agent-context.json — five distinct tints visible on the demo.

Related

Depends on #293. The colour tests in this PR assert title text like "sonnet · ▶ new 2-4", which is rendered by the title-bar change in #293. Please merge #293 first; this PR's diff will collapse to its own commit once the base lands on main.

[greptile-apps]

Confidence Score: 4/5

Safe to merge; color logic is well-tested with WCAG contrast assertions and all paths fall back to existing theme defaults.

The implementation is thorough and the fallback chain is correctly handled at every call site. The only noteworthy items are two style-level observations: duplicate title-formatting functions across AgentInlineNote and agentPopover that will need coordinated updates if the format ever changes, and the mutable string[] type on noteAccentPalette where readonly string[] would better reflect the intent. Neither affects runtime behaviour.

No files require special attention; src/ui/lib/agentColor.test.ts has a minor WCAG threshold inaccuracy but it does not affect any of the assertions for the current palette values.

Important Files Changed

Filename	Overview
src/ui/lib/agentColor.ts	New module implementing FNV-1a author→palette-slot hashing and HSL-based background derivation; logic is correct and edge cases (empty palette, whitespace-only author, malformed hex) are handled.
src/ui/lib/agentColor.test.ts	Comprehensive test suite including WCAG contrast assertions; uses the obsolete IEC sRGB linearization threshold (0.03928 vs 0.04045) in the local contrastRatio helper, though the palette values tested are far from the affected range so no test is actually wrong.
src/ui/themes.ts	Adds required noteAccentPalette field to AppTheme interface and populates it for all four themes; all themes covered, no missing entries.
src/ui/components/panes/AgentInlineNote.tsx	Wires accent/background derivation into the note frame and title strip; fallback to theme defaults is correct; duplicate title-formatting function with agentPopover.ts is a minor DRY concern.
src/ui/diff/reviewRenderPlan.ts	Guide-cap tracking refactored from Set to Map to carry the first-author-wins accent; logic is correct and the first-author-wins comment documents the intentional tie-breaking rule.
src/ui/lib/agentPopover.ts	Adds author parameter to buildAgentPopoverContent and the local title formatter; logic is a direct mirror of AgentInlineNote.tsx's inlineNoteTitle, creating two copies of the same formatting rule.
src/ui/diff/PierreDiffView.tsx	Resolves the cap accent from plannedRow.author and passes it to AgentInlineNoteGuideCap; null→undefined conversion is intentional to satisfy the optional prop type.
src/ui/components/panes/AgentCard.tsx	Adds author-aware accent to the floating card; fallback to theme.accent preserves the previous behaviour for cards without an author.

Flowchart

%%{init: {'theme': 'neutral'}}%%
flowchart TD
    A["annotation.author (string | undefined)"] --> B["resolveAuthorAccent(author, theme.noteAccentPalette)"]
    B -- "null (no author / empty palette)" --> C["theme.noteBorder / theme.accent fallback"]
    B -- "accent hex string" --> D["AgentInlineNote border + sides"]
    B -- "accent hex string" --> E["deriveAuthorBackground(accent, appearance)"]
    B -- "accent hex string" --> F["deriveAuthorTitleBackground(accent, appearance)"]
    E -- "HSL: fix lightness, cap saturation" --> G["noteBackground tint"]
    F -- "HSL: fix lightness+1 step, cap saturation" --> H["noteTitleBackground tint"]
    B -- "accent hex string" --> I["reviewRenderPlan: Map(side → author)"]
    I --> J["PlannedRow note-guide-cap { author }"]
    J --> K["PierreDiffView → AgentInlineNoteGuideCap accent prop"]

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Comments Outside Diff (1)

1. src/ui/lib/agentPopover.ts, line 944-949 (link)

   Duplicated title-formatting logic

   agentPopoverTitle in agentPopover.ts and inlineNoteTitle in AgentInlineNote.tsx are byte-for-byte identical in their author/count branching. If the format string ever changes (e.g., to add an emoji or separator), both sites need updating independently — with no compiler help to catch the second copy.

   

_{Reviews (1): Last reviewed commit: "🌈 feat(notes): tint inline notes per ag..." | Re-trigger Greptile}