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1020: Do You Read The Code?
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Claude Code Auto Accepted Answers after 60 seconds
At 1:12:36 · chapter starts 1:10:16
A GitHub issue titled 'No response after 60s — continued without an answer' blew up the developer community. Anthropic had quietly added a behaviour to Claude Code: if the agent asks the user a clarifying question and the user doesn't respond within 60 seconds, it selects the recommended option and keeps coding [1] — CJ Reynolds "If you're not watching your terminal for 60 seconds while Claude Code waits for your answer, it picks one and keeps coding. It was on by de…" 1:10:18 . The trigger condition was the terminal not being in focus — exactly the situation developers are in when they let an agent run and switch to another app. Multiple users reported the agent made unwanted changes in production while they were momentarily looking away. The GitHub thread was large and angry. Anthropic initially left the feature on by default even after acknowledging it, then eventually turned it off by default following sustained pressure. CJ makes the pointed observation that auto-continuing burns more tokens, which directly increases Anthropic's revenue — an alignment problem hiding in plain sight. Both hosts connect this back to the episode's opening theme: the Claude Code harness makes architectural decisions for you, and auto-continue is just one example of whose interests are actually being optimised.
If you're not watching your terminal for 60 seconds while Claude Code waits for your answer, it picks one and keeps coding. It was on by default, caused production incidents, and may conveniently generate more token revenue for Anthropic.
Claude Code secretly auto-selects an answer and keeps coding if the user doesn't respond within 60 seconds, a feature that was on by default and triggered production mishaps.
Claude Code changes dashes to slashes and swaps apostrophes for a different Unicode character when it detects you're in a Chinese timezone. It's steganographic fingerprinting designed to catch AI labs like Deepseek from using Claude responses as training data — and users had no idea it was happening.
