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.
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.
Spotted something wrong? Or know the PR text has fresher detail than the writeup above?