Every claude session in a directory claude had not seen before died about six
seconds after it started (`Pane is dead (status 1)`), before the agent drew a
composer. Reproduced on a fresh case and measured.
Claude Code 2.1.252 rewrote the dialog. It used to be
❯ 1. Yes, I trust this folder
2. No, exit
and is now unnumbered, reversed, and highlights the option that quits:
❯ No, exit
Yes, I trust this folder
Detection still worked (the confirm affordance carries the match once the
numbered option text is gone), so the failure was entirely in the answer: the
auto-accept pressed Enter on the highlighted default, which is now exit.
trustDialogNextKey() reads the ❯ marker off the rendered pane and returns ONE
keystroke at a time: an arrow while the cursor is on the wrong option, Enter
only once the screen shows it on the trust option, and null for a frame that
does not say. Both layouts are handled, and which way the trust option lies is
read from the frame rather than assumed, so a further reordering costs a
repaint instead of a session. The last marked option wins, because the
direct-PTY fallback reads an append-only buffer where an older frame must not
out-vote the freshest one.
Two things only a live pane showed:
- The scan ran solely from the PTY onData handler. The arrow that moves the
cursor is the last output the pane produces, so the first fix parked every
session with the cursor sitting on the right option and no Enter ever sent.
It now schedules its own follow-up read (_trustDialogTimer, cleared in
_clearAllTimers()), offset past the scan throttle so the chain cannot break
on a boundary.
- The keystroke cap goes 3 -> 6, since answering is no longer one press.
The bundled codeman skill had the same blind \r as its bounded fallback, so
preamble 1.21.0 replaces it with _trust_key/_accept_trust: read
terminal?full=1, steer onto the trust option, re-read, then confirm. Those
keystrokes go out under their own clientId, because input sequence numbers are
monotonic per client and spending prompt numbers on dialog keys would make the
next send-and-wait look like a stale duplicate and vanish while reporting
success. The readiness recipes in docs/extending-codeman.md,
docs/api-reference.md and the skill's own reference carry the corrected answer,
plus a symptom-table entry for a worker whose pane is dead seconds after spawn.
Verified live on an isolated instance (own data dir and tmux socket): fresh
case -> arrow at 5 s -> Enter at 7 s -> composer, with hasTrustDialogAccepted
recorded. With the server-side auto-accept disabled in a throwaway copy, the
skill's fallback cleared a genuinely parked dialog in 1.1 s and spawn_worker
took a brand-new case to a live composer in 7.2 s; spawn_workers + sendwait +
last_text then ran end to end.
A session on a fresh directory sat on Claude's "Quick safety check: Is
this a project you created or one you trust?" dialog until a human
pressed Enter. Reproduced on a new case, then read off the wire:
1.\x1b[C Yes,\x1b[C I\x1b[C trust\x1b[C this\x1b[C folder
tmux repaints a row by writing each word followed by a cursor-forward
escape instead of a space, and Ink colours each word separately, so
`data.includes('trust this folder')` could never match a chunk. The
spaces are not there to strip: they were never sent. The auto-accept has
been dead for every session that hit the dialog.
Match on whitespace-free, ANSI-free, lowercased text instead
(`compactScreenText`), which survives both that repaint style and the
spaced full-screen redraw.
Answering means pressing Enter into a session, so three guards bound it:
- Read the RENDERED SCREEN (capturePaneText), not the chunk. The terminal
buffer is append-only and keeps the dialog in its tail long after it
has been answered, so a retry driven off the buffer would type into a
live session. Direct-PTY sessions, which have no pane, fall back to a
short buffer tail.
- Require a trust phrase AND the dialog's own confirm affordance. One
phrase is not enough, since an agent's transcript can quote it.
- Only look during the first 90s of the pane's life, and cap it at three
attempts. Ink can drop a keystroke while it is still mounting the
widget, which is the other half of why sessions got stuck, but a
dialog that will not clear must not become an Enter loop.
Verified end to end on a fresh case: dialog answered on attempt 1, one
Enter sent in total, session went straight to the composer and answered a
prompt. Before the fix the same flow parked on the dialog indefinitely.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Codeman maintainer