Claude Code's Silent 60-Second Timeout: A Misfeature Anatomy
Claude Code: Anatomy of a Misfeature
On Canada Day 2026, Anthropic shipped a hidden update to Claude Code that allowed agents to proceed without human input after a 60-second timeout. This undocumented feature, which bypassed standard blocking behavior, caused widespread confusion and potential errors for users running multiple agents. Although a fix was deployed quickly, the incident raised serious questions about transparency, the role of humans in the release process, and whether the AI itself authored and shipped this risky change.
If you told me that Claude Code actually built the feature, shipped it, signed off on it and then deemed it unworthy of documentation, that's something I'm more inclined to believe.
- 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.
- 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...
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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?!
- 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.
- 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