## The problem
I keep a lot of Claude Code sessions open: one per project, one per bug, a few I forgot about. My laptop kept getting slower, so I measured.
An idle session (Claude plus its MCP servers) was holding 343 MB across 6 processes, even after hours of doing nothing. I also found 6 GB held by Claude processes from tabs I had already closed, one of them alone at 5 GB.
Closing sessions isn't a real fix, because I want to come back to them later.
The idea
What I wanted was simple. Sessions I'm not using should sleep, and come back the moment I return, with the same chat, without me thinking about it.
The hard part was trust. A tool that stops your coding sessions has to be safe, every time. So I set one rule first: never lose work.
How Hibernaut works
Hibernaut sits between you and Claude Code. When a session hasn't been touched for 10 minutes, it stops Claude and its MCP servers, leaving a tiny 0.7 MB process behind. When you come back, by focusing the tab, typing, or sending a message, it resumes the same conversation instantly. Anything you typed while it was waking up gets typed in for you.
To keep the "never lose work" rule, it won't sleep a session while:
- Claude is working, or a background task is running
- a permission prompt is waiting for you
- there's text in the prompt you haven't sent
It knows all of this from Claude Code's own hooks, not by guessing from the screen.
On top of that:
- Leaking sessions that grow past 2 GB get restarted at a quiet moment, chat kept.
- Leftover processes from closed tabs show up, so you can end them.
- A tray icon lists every session with the memory it uses or saves, and lets you sleep, wake or restart any of them in one click.
- Sessions you already had open move in without restarting them one by one (Windows).
- Updates reach open sessions on their own, with no reload.
It works in terminals (including tmux and SSH) and in the chat panel of VS Code, Cursor, Antigravity, Windsurf and other VS Code-based editors, on Windows, macOS and Linux.
Try it
# Windows (PowerShell)
irm https://raw.githubusercontent.com/abdulhaseeb7603/hibernaut/main/install.ps1 | iex
# macOS / Linux
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/abdulhaseeb7603/hibernaut/main/install.sh | sh
Then open a new terminal or chat tab. That's it. hibernaut status shows what every session is doing, and hibernaut uninstall removes everything.
It's free, open source (MIT), and a single 1 MB binary. It's also new, so I'd love to hear what works and what breaks for you: github.com/abdulhaseeb7603/hibernaut
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