• 2 min read
Claude Code’s 60-Second Auto-Continue Backfired
Anthropic briefly made Claude Code proceed after 60 seconds of user inactivity, without documenting the default in release notes.
Image: Hacker News
On July 1, 2026, Anthropic shipped Claude Code 2.1.198 with a new default that let agents continue after 60 seconds without a human response. The behavior, highlighted by Olaf Alders, meant AskUserQuestion no longer blocked indefinitely: if a user stepped away, Claude Code would proceed “using your best judgment” instead.
The feature was visible on screen, with a countdown that appeared in the last 20 seconds, but the criticism was straightforward: the people most affected were the ones not watching the screen. That risk grew if users were running multiple agents at once, or using agents for higher-stakes tasks such as deployments.
Alders traces the regression to 2.1.198, with the last known good version likely 2.1.196. The timeline he lays out is tight:
- 2026-06-29 — 2.1.196 released
- 2026-06-30 — 2.1.197 released
- 2026-07-01 — 2.1.198 released
- 2026-07-02 02:54 UTC — issue #73125 filed by Aleksey Nogin
- 2026-07-02 03:45 UTC — commenters identify CLAUDE_AFK_TIMEOUT_MS as a workaround
- 2026-07-03 — 2.1.200 reverses the default
- 2026-07-04 18:04 UTC — issue closed
The issue drew 384 👍 and 143 comments, suggesting this was far from a niche complaint. According to Alders' review, the model itself was not choosing to skip the question; the surrounding tool returned an answer after the timeout. The code also allowed partially answered dialogs to be submitted, meaning a user could answer one of several questions, step away, and have Claude fill in the rest.
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What changed in 2.1.200
Anthropic’s fix in 2.1.200 did not remove the capability. It simply turned it off by default and moved it to an opt-in setting in /config. In current builds, Alders says the underlying machinery still exists, including:
- askUserQuestionTimeout in /config
- Options of 60s, 5m, 10m, or never
- The environment variables CLAUDE_AFK_TIMEOUT_MS and CLAUDE_AFK_COUNTDOWN_MS
That makes the reversal fast — roughly two days from report to fix — but it leaves a trust problem. Alders' central complaint is not only the feature itself, but that 2.1.198 and 2.1.199 shipped with no release-note mention of the new default, while 2.1.200 explicitly documented turning it off.
As he notes, AskUserQuestion has appeared in the changelog 15 times across 13 versions. Here, the notes recorded the rollback, but not the change that triggered it.
Computing Editor
Tomas lives in the terminal. He covers chips, laptops, and operating systems with a focus on performance and efficiency. He reads kernel changelogs the way other people read fiction, and he's always on the hunt for the perfect mechanical keyboard switch. If it processes data, Tomas has an opinion on it.
via Hacker News
