chat: onboarding answers the pointer and a second enter, no telemetry notice or command, and free models only on a low account

[ZeroPoint95]

Santosh's first-run notes from 2026-09-30, the non-Teams half (Notion), plus the owner's follow-ups on the same screen. Every item below is in docs/changes/unreleased/1720-onboarding-ux-cleanups.md as an invalidates line; the manual's getting-started, openrouter-credits and running-from-the-terminal pages follow it.

1. The interactive menus

• The welcome screen's starting points took every enter. The first enter filled the box; the second, the one that sends, was still taken by the list and sent nothing. With words in the box, enter is the composer's: ↓ enter enter sends.
• The setup's controls screen swallowed every mouse press. Rows now answer a press the way the key would (limit focuses, chat model opens the list, a model in the list is taken, Start a conversation leaves); the wheel scrolls the open list.
• Enter goes on. After a model is taken the focus moves to the next row, so enter alone walks the whole form.

2. Telemetry

• The usage-counts notice no longer appears on the first conversation's screen, ahead of --once, or ahead of a task; the "nothing sent until shown" gate goes with it.
• codeaf telemetry (status, info, show, on, off) is removed. The disclosure is the README's Telemetry section and docs/TELEMETRY.md, held to the switches by the telemetry package's doc test. The switches are unchanged: /settings telemetry toggle, CODEAF_TELEMETRY=off, DO_NOT_TRACK=1, the project file, an empty endpoint.

3. OpenRouter account state

• Low balance: the setup's model list is cut to free rows (:free ids and zero-priced catalog rows) and says free only; the model in use stays on the list. The warning stands right-aligned on the frame's last row, where the keys row carries it outside the setup.
• Expired key (new): a balance read answered API key expired is a reading of its own (credits.Reading.Expired, kept beside low in credits.json). Your OpenRouter key has expired — make a new one at openrouter.ai/settings/keys stands under the message box in a conversation and on Home for every OpenRouter model, free included; the setup says it on its last row; a turn refused as expired asks for a fresh read through provider.APIError.KeyExpired (the taxonomy law forbids reading the status in the surface); the free defaults are not used for it.

4. The controls screen itself (owner's follow-ups)

• One column: the example panel on top (up to 92 cells, whole or not at all), two blank rows, the heading Basic settings, the keys line directly under it, then the rows. The old two-column layout, Models and spending + lead sentence, and the panel's An illustration… foot line are gone.
• The panel's edge carries the example's title; a fifth example, Hand off complex coding tasks, asks /senior-dev …; commands in requests, explanations and the note wear the composer's chip.
• The panel turns on its own clock: opens on 1/5, next every 3 s round the ring; ←/→ browse; any key holds the clock 3 s; the focus never moves it; the screen-reader tier never turns by itself.
• Row names: body ink until answered, accent while focused, dim once enter has acted. Keys line: enter sets the limit · ↑↓ moves · …, no tab moves, no ←→ examples. The loose enter beside Start a conversation is gone.
• The review row (Other settings use defaults · review) is removed; a dim note Everything else is in /settings stands under the way out.
• The model list is a flat list of exact ids. The limit's explanation names /budget, the model's /model; ? on the limit explains the day's and the conversation's ceilings and how they meet.

Proof

• Tests cover every item above (internal/tui3, internal/credits, internal/config, internal/provider, internal/telemetry, cmd/codeaf), the manual gate has new probes, the untagged internal/e2e needle gate and make test-laws are green, and make test-quick is green on the branch head.
• Verified by hand in tmux against a fresh home: clicks on every row, the welcome without the notice, ↓ enter enter sending, the one-column layout at 130×40 and its fallback at 120×24, the panel turning on its clock and holding on keys, the chips in the capture's escape bytes, and the expired-key warning on the welcome screen against a local stub.
• Not seen by hand: the low-credits and expired-key lines on the setup's last row (the paste-a-key road needs a reachable OpenRouter); their placement is pinned by unit tests.
• make pr-ready has not been run on this branch.

Open question left to the owner: the ←/→ glyphs read as asymmetric in the terminal font; every mirror-image alternative is a vocabulary glyph with another meaning, so they were left as they are.

A Linux arm64 build of the head is packaged as a Docker image for first-run trials (docker run -it --rm codeaf-onboarding); the Dockerfile lives outside the repository.

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