vscode: re-bucket Builders tree — actively-communicated blocked builders sort below active, truly-blocked stays on top

[amrmelsayed]

Problem

The Builders tree treats every gate-blocked builder as equally urgent — they all sort to the top with a bell icon and a wait-time suffix. In practice, "blocked" splits into two very different cases:

1. Truly blocked — the builder hit a gate (e.g. plan-approval) and nobody has touched it since. This is the one that wants attention.
2. Blocked while the architect is actively in dialog with it — the gate is open but the engineer is mid-conversation, sending messages, iterating. Surfacing this row at the top with the same urgency as a truly-stuck builder is noise; the engineer already knows it's there because they're typing to it right now.

The current top-bucket placement makes the second case feel like an alarm that won't quiet.

Current state

• Sort order in packages/vscode/src/views/builders.ts:23–28 (orderForDisplay):
  1. blocked (any b.blocked truthy), sorted by blockedSince ascending.
  2. idleWaiting (isIdleWaiting(b, now)).
  3. active (everything else).
• OverviewBuilder.lastDataAt (@cluesmith/codev-types, exposed via overview.ts:73) already tracks when Tower last received output from the builder's shell — updated whenever the architect's input echoes back or the agent emits anything.
• isIdleWaiting(b) (packages/core/src/builder-helpers.ts:30) returns true for non-blocked, non-complete builders silent past IDLE_WAITING_THRESHOLD_MS = 5 minutes (line 19). The same threshold is the natural cut-off for "actively communicating" applied to blocked builders.

Proposed behavior

1. New predicate

Add isActivelyCommBlocked(b, now) in packages/core/src/builder-helpers.ts:

export function isActivelyCommBlocked(b: OverviewBuilder, now: number = Date.now()): boolean {
  if (!b.blocked) return false;
  if (!b.lastDataAt) return false;
  return now - new Date(b.lastDataAt).getTime() <= IDLE_WAITING_THRESHOLD_MS;
}

Co-located with isIdleWaiting so the threshold policy stays in one place.

2. New four-bucket sort order

Top-down:

1. Truly blocked — b.blocked && !isActivelyCommBlocked(b). Sorted longest-blockedSince first.
2. Idle waiting — isIdleWaiting(b) (unchanged).
3. Active — everything that doesn't match the others (unchanged).
4. Actively-comm blocked — isActivelyCommBlocked(b). Sorted most-recent-lastDataAt first (so the one you're typing into right now is at the bottom-most slot — close to where the input cursor sits in the terminal pane).

3. Visual treatment

• Truly blocked: existing bell icon + wait-time suffix; unchanged.
• Actively-comm blocked: distinct icon (e.g. $(comment-discussion) instead of $(bell)) and the row label still surfaces the gate (blocked on <gate>) so the user remembers which gate is in play — but the visual weight is de-emphasised (no wait-time scream).
• Idle-waiting and active: unchanged.

4. Threshold reuse

Use the existing IDLE_WAITING_THRESHOLD_MS = 5 minutes — no new tunable. A blocked builder you haven't typed to in >5 minutes promotes itself back to "truly blocked" (top bucket), which matches user intent: dialog has stalled, the gate is now really blocking.

Acceptance criteria

• isActivelyCommBlocked() predicate added to packages/core/src/builder-helpers.ts, alongside isIdleWaiting.
• orderForDisplay in views/builders.ts returns four buckets in the order above.
• Truly-blocked rows render unchanged (bell icon, wait-time suffix).
• Actively-comm-blocked rows render with a distinct icon and no wait-time suffix; gate label preserved.
• Sort ordering reactively updates as lastDataAt ticks past the threshold (no extra polling — relies on existing SSE refresh cadence).
• No additional Tower instrumentation needed; uses existing lastDataAt.

Out of scope

• A separate threshold for "actively communicating" different from IDLE_WAITING_THRESHOLD_MS (intentionally — one threshold, one policy).
• Manual "I'm working on this" flag.
• Auto-collapse / auto-pin of the actively-comm group.