Walkthrough polish pass fixes localStorage bug and softens unreachable-backend errors

foolish-bandit did a manual walkthrough of the new Gary flows and pushed a small cleanup: a localStorage desktop-sidebar bug fix, softened error messages for when the backend isn't reachable, a sidebar nav relabel, upload error surfacing in `InitialView`, and a dev-bypass notice on the login/signup pages.

chat-uibranding

The bug fix is in (pages)/layout.tsx. The effect persisting the desktop sidebar open/closed state was writing isSidebarOpen.toString() - the mobile state variable - to localStorage, even though the effect dependency array already tracked isSidebarOpenDesktop. The corrected line reads localStorage.setItem("sidebarOpen", isSidebarOpenDesktop.toString()). One line, but a real correctness issue.

The error message changes across /draft, /review, and InitialView replace "Could not start the {draft|review}. Try again." with "This will be available once GaryOSS is connected to the backend." This is honest: on a demo deploy, handleNewChat returns null because there's no backend to call. The old copy implied a transient failure; the new copy names the actual cause. InitialView also gains an explicit uploadError state so upload failures surface inline rather than failing silently.

The sidebar label change ("Assistant" -> "Ask Gary") is product-specific. The login/signup dev-bypass notice complements the in-app banner from the auth bypass feature: when NEXT_PUBLIC_GARY_SKIP_AUTH=true, an amber block appears on those pages so developers can see auth is being skipped before they even log in.

So what The localStorage fix is worth importing on its own - it's a correctness bug present in the upstream code. Everything else is Gary-specific copy or brand. Small diff (7 files, +31/-6) and low risk.

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Commits in this thread

2 commits from foolish-bandit/gary, oldest first. Source extracted verbatim from the harvested git log.

SHA Subject Author Date
d3b7ad48 Frontend walkthrough polish and bugfix pass Zack Brenner 2026-05-07 ↗ GitHub
6d551b93 Merge pull request #12 from foolish-bandit/codex/create-pr-#10-frontend-polish-and-bugfix Zack Brenner 2026-05-07 ↗ GitHub
Frontend walkthrough polish and bugfix pass

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