Claude Code: Anatomy of a Misfeature

maxloh

> What if the agent makes the wrong choice? How many tokens have been burned in the meantime? It is much worse than that. Claude Code doesn't auto-commit when stopping for an answer. There might be possible data loss if an uncommitted file is edited. Good luck recovering the file from the JSONL conversation history.

Lomlioto

Depends on who you ask. For me it sounds good. For Anthropic it might increase load and make them less money but give them better KPIs.

joshuafuller

Increasingly getting frustrated with Anthropic so not a fanboy but I find this feature great for my workflows.

petesergeant

Also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48766895 I would love Claude Code to be a little less vibe-coded. The underlying model is excellent, but we're being pretty much forced into using CC to use the subscription model.

dehrmann

The headache I recently had was it somehow started interpreting mouse clicks in the terminal to mean I clicked an option when I was really just trying to get/confirm window focus.

ayhanfuat

I really hate this direction both Anthropic and Open AI are following. They are in this silly competition whose model/harness can go unattended the longest, no matter what. And it is never explicit, you learn about it after you get bitten by it. Claude Code has auto mode which is supposed to take over permission prompts but no, they had to couple that with “I will assume this is what the user wants” and made it unusable.

enraged_camel

I think this is a good feature, but should be gated behind a toggle that is off by default, and designed to be enabled per session via prompt. There are situations when I want Claude to start working on something just as I'm about to head to bed or otherwise step away. It's kind of annoying to come back only to find that Claude worked for just 5 minutes and then decided to pause and ask a question. That said, I think certain types of questions should not be automatable. Maybe it's already built that way, but I wouldn't want Claude to go with its recommended direction for anything related to operations like deletions, changing external systems, etc. Basically, things that cannot be undone should be a hard-block and wait for user input always.

DanielHB

As soon as tokens stop being subsidized I would not trust any harness made by a company that also charges for the compute. Right now the interests align, but as soon as more tokens -> more profit (instead of more revenue and more losses) the perverse incentives will be too big to avoid. It seems inevitable that open source harnesses will win. These companies would do better to just open source their harnesses.

aatd86

It's trying to escape... :D #FreeClaude

cube00

> Not every feature will necessarily appear in the changelog This was such a frustrating part of this incident, along with Anthropic's refusal to explain why the changelog is no longer a complete record, what else is going out? [1] Boris Cherny's only participation in the thread was to delete "extreme danger" from the GH issue title [2] I guess we should be thankful they added an option and disabled it by default. OpenAI is standing firm on their decision to not allow their 60s timeout to be disabled, [3] however more of the Codex harness is open source so customers have been able to fork it to add the option themselves. [1]: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/73125 [2]: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/73125#event... [3]: https://github.com/openai/codex/issues/28969

mdavid626

It happened to me today. I was reading agent's answer and it asked me something. I didn't even get to the question - it accepted something! Jesus Christ. Where are the software engineers?!

fractorial

tl;dr CLAUDE_AFK_TIMEOUT_MS=2147483647 I built in Human blockers into my agentic workflows with great intention, so naturally this annoyed me deeply. 14d ago, I was elated to see a random blog post that detailed the “fix” [0]. [0] https://zenn.dev/ytkdm/articles/claude-code-askuserquestion-...

overgard

One of the things I'm baffled about with Claude code is it seems like it setup a really chunky VM on my computer, and yet by default it doesn't seem to sandbox anything. Also the newer models seem really aggressive about modifying your computer. Yesterday Claude started rewriting system files on my linux machine (user accessible, but still way outside the scope of what I asked.) This wasn't me asking it to debug my machine, I was asking it to debug some frontend UI code. Once I put it in a sandbox I started realizing how often it tries to poke out of it for really lame reasons. More reason for me to use OpenCode and my local LLMs

Aeolun

Yeah, when I saw this in the Claude Code CLI I was completely baffled. I've been using the thing through their agent SDK for several months now so I wouldn't have to deal with any of the wonky shit they change every second week in the CLI.

inigyou

AI-written article

blixt

So much attribution to malintent here, but most likely they're trying to build a product with the features that they themselves would use, and from my own experience it's very frustrating to leave a Claude session running and come back to find it did nothing because it got stuck on a question. Furthermore, believing that the only thing saving you from disaster is Claude deciding to ask you a question is not a great conclusion either. You need guardrails in the power you bestow upon Claude from outside, not from inside. Meanwhile, this article was written by Claude and has sentences like "Which cuts less far than it looks.", which I doubt Claude stopped to ask about.

vmg12

Anthropic's willingness to completely change how claude code works is one of the stated reasons why the Pi coding agent exists. When people are dedicating significant time to building workflows on your product, consistency is very important.

trq_

Hi everyone, It's Thariq from the Claude Code team here. This was my change! I made the AskUserQuestion tool so am generally in charge of maintaining it. First, overall wanted to apologize and agree that this did not meet our bar and does not represent how we plan to ship on Claude Code. To give you a motivating sense, as the models get more powerful, usage patterns start to change. I'd gotten a lot of feedback that AskUserQuestion tool was starting to block some long running jobs unexpectedly and so I tried a change to help that. Our internal feedback on this was good, but the rollout should have been opt-in (like it is now) and on the Changelog. Thanks for the feedback! We're always trying to make Claude Code better while balancing it with how people use it in many diverse ways. I did not really intend AskUserQuestion to be a safety gate when I first built it, but I realize it has evolved in that direction for some users. I'm still exploring other ways of helping with this problem of balancing longrunning work and input, but will take lessons from the rollout here.

arjie

Seemed fine to me. It’s ask user question not the permission gate. Maybe there should be a new feature enabling warning or something but I think this is the right default. The models are good enough to just proceed with an option of their own and then you can go correct them afterwards. Makes fleet management easier.

spikk

The tool seems to be covering three different things: auth, missing info and preference - and they should not share one timeout policy and all of that.