Anthropic quietly added a feature to Claude Code where, if a user doesn't respond to a clarifying question within 60 seconds (and the terminal isn't focused), it auto-selects an answer and keeps coding — a behavior that sparked backlash and multiple reports of unwanted production changes before it was made off by default.

71:03uh agent coding tools have the ability as well to ask you a question to get clarification on something. So maybe you're writing a plan. It'll ask you, oh do you want to use this versus that or how do we want do we want to approach it this way or that way? And you can answer that question with a prompt or by choosing from multiple choice. But the

71:21Claude team secretly added this feature where if the user does not answer within 60 seconds, it just automatically chooses an answer and keeps going. >> Wow. The recommended one. >> Yeah. Well, yeah, it chooses like whatever. Yeah, because a lot of times they'll be like, I recommend you choose this answer, but here are some other options. And so, yeah, it'll choose the the recommended option or whichever

71:39option it thought um and just keep on coding. And there's a massive thread on GitHub that filed this as a bug that was like this should not be on by default. >> I agree with that. >> There are multiple stories in the in the GitHub comments of like this happened to me like I was running three different sessions and I don't always have every session in focus.

72:00>> So it just kept on coding and then like did some stuff in production I didn't want it to. Um and I think like that's the other aspect of this. they actually had detection to see okay if the terminal is not focused meaning like you're using the web browser or some other app that's when this will kick in. So it's never if you are if you directly

72:18have your your your terminal focused >> but yeah people went wild in the comments. >> Yeah >> I never have [clears throat] my terminal focused when it's cooking on something. I just let it go and then go look at something else. Oh I'm looking at something else now. Yes. >> And uh and on Mac OS at least even cloud code running in the terminal has notifications. So, like if it does ask

72:36me a question, I can see, oh, I a notification pops up. I'm going to go take a look at that in a second when I'm done with whatever else I'm working on. I would never want it to just keep on coding if I don't respond for 60 seconds. Um, so I do believe they they and here's the other issue. They fixed it, but they they left it on by default,

72:57and then people kept complaining more and more, and finally it's off by default. I do believe >> I all they had to do was prompt uh prompt their model uh to to fix it and you know if nobody takes a look at it will fix itself right that's the >> the future yeah >> exactly so yeah this is the we've talked about this before but the fact that