Phone/daemon-spawned sessions skip --append-system-prompt (lose auto-title + shared skills)

[mislaughter1989-del]

Bug: Phone/daemon-spawned sessions skip --append-system-prompt, losing auto-title behavior and shared skills

Summary

Sessions launched from the mobile app's "+ New Session" button (which invokes happy claude --happy-starting-mode remote --started-by daemon) receive a different, drastically smaller appendSystemPrompt than sessions launched from the terminal (happy claude, happy yolo).

The phone/daemon-spawn path only attaches a # Options helper block. The terminal-spawn path attaches a full prompt that includes the mcp__happy__change_title instruction plus all configured shared skills (Brainstorming, TDD, Git Checkpoint, etc.).

User-visible result: phone-initiated new sessions never auto-title, because the model is never told to call mcp__happy__change_title. Terminal-initiated sessions still auto-title correctly. Resumed sessions also still have titles because they inherit the original prompt.

Environment

• Happy CLI: 1.1.8
• Claude Code: 2.1.177 (native installer)
• Node: v22.22.3
• OS: Linux (Ubuntu, kernel 6.17)
• Daemon mode: start-sync, healthy, port assigned dynamically
• Machine ID: redacted

Expected behavior

A new session created from the phone app's "+ New Session" button should receive the same --append-system-prompt value as a terminal-launched session — including the title-instruction prompt and any configured shared skills. The model should then proactively call mcp__happy__change_title on its first response and the chat title in the app should update from "new chat" to something descriptive.

Actual behavior

Phone-spawned sessions receive only the # Options helper block in appendSystemPrompt. The title-instruction and shared skills are missing. The chat title stays at "new chat" indefinitely.

Reproduction

1. Tap + New Session in the mobile app, targeting a machine running Happy CLI 1.1.8 in daemon mode.
2. Send any user message into the new session.
3. Observe: title in the session list stays "new chat"; the model does not call mcp__happy__change_title.
4. For contrast, run happy claude (or happy yolo) directly in a terminal on the same machine — the resulting session does get auto-titled correctly.

Log evidence

Two sessions from the same machine, same Happy CLI version, same morning:

Session A — terminal-launched happy yolo (PID 69182, 07:01:07) — works correctly

[07:01:04.253] Starting happy CLI with args:  [ '/usr/bin/node',
  '.../happy/dist/index.mjs', 'yolo' ]
...
[07:01:07.144] [ClaudeLocal] Args: [
  "--append-system-prompt",
  "ALWAYS when you start a new chat - you must call a tool
   \"mcp__happy__change_title\" to set a chat title. When you think chat
   title is not relevant anymore - call the tool again to change it...
   [... + commit-message coauthor block + all shared skills:
        Brainstorming, Caveman Mode, Git Checkpoint, Grill With Docs,
        Test-Driven Development ...]",
  "--mcp-config", "{\"mcpServers\":{\"happy\":{...}}}",
  "--allowedTools", "mcp__happy__change_title",
  "yolo",
  "--settings", ".../session-hook-69182.json"
]

Session B — phone "+ New Session", daemon-spawned (PID 977249, 09:24:04) — title-instruction MISSING

[09:24:04.253] Starting happy CLI with args:  [
  '/usr/bin/node',
  '.../happy/dist/index.mjs',
  'claude',
  '--happy-starting-mode', 'remote',
  '--started-by', 'daemon',
  '--permission-mode', 'bypassPermissions'
]
[09:24:04.281] [START] Options: startedBy=daemon, startingMode=remote
...
(No `[ClaudeLocal] Args` line ever logged.)
...
"appendSystemPrompt": "# Options\n\nYou have a way to give a user a easy
   way to answer your questions if you know possible an... [truncated]"

grep "append" Session-B.log returns only 5 hits, all to the same truncated # Options block. There is no change_title string anywhere in Session B's launcher log.

grep "change_title" Session-A.log → 1 hit (in --append-system-prompt).
grep "change_title" Session-B.log → 0 hits.

Impact

• Loss of one of Happy's most useful UX features (auto-titling) on the most common new-session path (the phone button).
• Phone-initiated sessions silently lose access to all configured shared skills (/brainstorming, /caveman, /git-checkpoint, /grill-with-docs, /tdd, etc.), making them feel less capable than terminal-initiated sessions.
• The user-visible symptom ("titles aren't changing anymore") gives no hint that the underlying cause is a much broader system-prompt divergence.

Suspected fix

The launch path branched on --started-by daemon / --happy-starting-mode remote should attach the same appendSystemPrompt payload as the terminal-launched path. Specifically, the routine in dist/index.mjs (or the chunk dist/index-q9G4ktSK.mjs / dist/index-JEiJokCS.cjs, which is where the title prompt + skills are concatenated) should be invoked for both launch flavors before spawning the claude binary.

Files referenced (from logs)

• Working: ~/.happy/logs/2026-06-14-07-01-03-pid-69182.log
• Broken: ~/.happy/logs/2026-06-14-09-24-03-pid-977249.log
• Launcher: ~/.npm-global/lib/node_modules/happy/scripts/claude_local_launcher.cjs
• Prompt-bearing chunk: ~/.npm-global/lib/node_modules/happy/dist/index-q9G4ktSK.mjs (contains the literal ALWAYS when you start a new chat string)

Workaround

Launch new sessions from the machine's terminal (happy claude or happy yolo) instead of the phone "+ New Session" button. The session then appears in the phone list and can be driven from the app with full auto-titling and shared-skill access.

[mislaughter1989-del]

Local patch — verified working

Traced the divergence and applied a working patch locally. Posting in case it's useful upstream.

Root cause (in dist/index-q9G4ktSK.mjs of v1.1.8)

The module-level systemPrompt constant (defined at line 324) holds the title-instruction + ~/.happy/skills/*.md payload. For local/terminal sessions it gets pushed into the spawn args at line 550 (args.push("--append-system-prompt", systemPrompt)).

For remote/daemon-spawned sessions, the per-message handler in runClaude (lines 6131–6266) reads message.meta.appendSystemPrompt (which contains just the # Options helper) and assigns it directly to the spawn enhancedMode.appendSystemPrompt, never concatenating in the global systemPrompt. Result: phone-spawned sessions get only # Options, never the title-instruction or shared skills.

Lines 1564–1565 already do the right thing for initial-mode setup — they concat. The fix is to apply the same pattern in the per-message handler.

Patch (3 spots — /compact, /clear, and main message branches)

--- a/dist/index-q9G4ktSK.mjs
+++ b/dist/index-q9G4ktSK.mjs
@@ -6193,7 +6193,7 @@
         model: messageModel,
         fallbackModel: messageFallbackModel,
         customSystemPrompt: messageCustomSystemPrompt,
-        appendSystemPrompt: messageAppendSystemPrompt,
+        appendSystemPrompt: currentRunMode === "remote" ? (messageAppendSystemPrompt ? messageAppendSystemPrompt + "\n\n" + systemPrompt : systemPrompt) : messageAppendSystemPrompt,
         allowedTools: messageAllowedTools,
         disallowedTools: messageDisallowedTools
       };
@@ -6208,7 +6208,7 @@
         model: messageModel,
         fallbackModel: messageFallbackModel,
         customSystemPrompt: messageCustomSystemPrompt,
-        appendSystemPrompt: messageAppendSystemPrompt,
+        appendSystemPrompt: currentRunMode === "remote" ? (messageAppendSystemPrompt ? messageAppendSystemPrompt + "\n\n" + systemPrompt : systemPrompt) : messageAppendSystemPrompt,
         allowedTools: messageAllowedTools,
         disallowedTools: messageDisallowedTools
       };
@@ -6259,7 +6259,7 @@
       model: messageModel,
       fallbackModel: messageFallbackModel,
       customSystemPrompt: messageCustomSystemPrompt,
-      appendSystemPrompt: messageAppendSystemPrompt,
+      appendSystemPrompt: currentRunMode === "remote" ? (messageAppendSystemPrompt ? messageAppendSystemPrompt + "\n\n" + systemPrompt : systemPrompt) : messageAppendSystemPrompt,
       allowedTools: messageAllowedTools,
       disallowedTools: messageDisallowedTools
     };

The currentRunMode === "remote" gate preserves local-mode behavior (where line 550 already injects systemPrompt via the CLI flag), so there's no double-injection.

Verification

After patching, a phone-spawned session (startedBy=daemon, startingMode=remote) successfully auto-titled on first response, and ~/.happy/skills/*.md slash-commands became available — both behaviors that match terminal-spawned sessions.

The fix presumably belongs in the source repo (not the bundled chunk) — the source file that constructs enhancedMode in the message handler should pull in the module-level systemPrompt constant the same way the initial-mode setup at lines 1564–1565 does.

Happy to PR if you point me at the source location.