Claude Code VS Code extension freezes with multiple chat tabs? Workaround for Windows

#ai #productivity #programming #llm

If your Claude Code extension hangs/freezes when running multiple agents, then I feel your pain.

The root cause appears to be multiple claude.exe processes fighting over ~/.claude.json with no file locking. Anthropic knows, the 2.0.61 changelog literally says:

2.0.61

Reverted VSCode support for multiple terminal clients due to responsiveness issues.

They added multi-tab support, claim it broke, and they reverted it. Multiple tabs used to work fine for me before 2.0.61, now newer versions freeze constantly.

Workaround: pin to 2.0.60

Install 2.0.60 from the VSIX and disable auto-update. This is the last version before the multi-client changes landed.

Next problem: 2.0.60 has claude-opus-4-5-20251101 hardcoded and doesn't recognize Opus 4.6.

Fix: patch the binary

Close VS Code completely, then run in PowerShell:

# Back up first
$dir = "$env:USERPROFILE\.vscode\extensions\anthropic.claude-code-2.0.60-win32-x64\resources\native-binary"
Copy-Item "$dir\claude.exe" "$dir\claude.exe.bak"

# Patch
$bytes = [System.IO.File]::ReadAllBytes("$dir\claude.exe")
$enc = [System.Text.Encoding]::GetEncoding("iso-8859-1")
$text = $enc.GetString($bytes)

$idx = 0; $count = 0
while (($idx = $text.IndexOf('"claude-opus-4-5-20251101"', $idx)) -ne -1) {
    $r = $enc.GetBytes('"claude-opus-4-6"         ')
    [Array]::Copy($r, 0, $bytes, $idx, $r.Length)
    $count++; $idx += 26
}

[System.IO.File]::WriteAllBytes("$dir\claude.exe", $bytes)
Write-Host "Patched $count occurrence(s)."