Tell HN: Claude CLI doesn't exit anymore, not even with CTRL-C

Anthropic's Claude CLI no longer terminates when users press CTRL-C or type /exit, leaving a background process running even when no work was done, according to a Hacker News "Tell HN" post. The post states the behavior is not a bug but a "feature" introduced earlier this year tied to Agent View, and that users must set disableAgentView in settings.json to stop it — at the cost of the main chat-list view, though the poster later noted `claude --resume` still lists chats with search. The post had 3 points and 0 comments at the time of submission.

So I found myself surprised today that exiting the CLI with CTRL-C does not, in fact, close Claude CLI. What it does is it closes the agent's terminal interface, but it leaves a background process active, even if you didn't work on anything at all. Try it yourself: run claude, exit to main conversations list, close it immediately with CTRL-C or /exit, then ps ax|grep claude . Apparently it's not a bug, it's a "feature", introduced earlier this year. You need to disable Agent View https://code.claude.com/docs/en/agent-view, disableAgentView in settings.json to stop that behavior. But then you lose the ability to open the list all your chats in main view, effectively crippling it. This is yet another frustrating anti-pattern they introduce and it personally upsets me that 5 decades of established paradigms CTRL-C is CTRL-C continue to be thrown out of the window just like that. I guess at 30k changes a day you kinda have to fell entitled to not care about anything legacy. EDIT: you can still show a list of chats with disableAgentView, just need an explicit claude --resume . It's a different UI, but with an actual search Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50214693 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50214693 Points: 3 Comments: 0