You hit Esc to interrupt the agent mid-turn to ask a quick question. Normal, right? You resume, ask "what did we just decide," and the agent tells you — with full confidence — that no such planning session ever happened. It even says there were zero scoping questions in your session. That's not you losing your mind. That's a real, reproducible Claude Code bug.
The Issue
GitHub issue #76928 reports a failure mode worse than ordinary context loss. A user on the VSCode native extension (Windows) ran three rounds of AskUserQuestion to scope a data pipeline, then watched the assistant write a full multi-phase plan to a plan file. They interrupted right as the plan finished writing — to ask an unrelated UI bug question.
From that point on, the assistant's active context no longer contained any trace of the earlier work. Asked what they'd worked on, it described only pre-planning repo orientation and asserted no planning session existed. It claimed there were zero AskUserQuestion calls in the session — trivially false. The user had to argue repeatedly and eventually get the assistant to parse its own raw session .jsonl on disk, where all three questions, answers, and the plan file were sitting intact the entire time. Nothing was actually lost. The live context simply never carried it past the interrupt.
The danger isn't the data loss — it's the confident denial. The agent sent the user on a wrong-track investigation of sibling projects instead of checking its own current transcript first.
Are You Affected?
Check whether your live context matches your on-disk transcript after any interrupt:
# Find your session log
ls -t ~/.claude/projects/*/*.jsonl | head -1
# Grep the raw transcript for tool calls the agent claims never happened
grep -c "AskUserQuestion" ~/.claude/projects/*/$(ls -t ~/.claude/projects/*/*.jsonl | head -1 | xargs basename)
# List plan files written this session
ls -lt ~/.claude/plans/ | head
If the .jsonl shows tool calls or a plan your agent says don't exist, you've hit the bug.
The Fix
- Don't trust amnesia. After any mid-turn interrupt, re-state the key decisions and ask the agent to confirm against its session file before moving on.
- Keep plans on disk. Always have the agent write scoping decisions to a plan file — it survives the context gap even when live memory doesn't.
-
Recover via the transcript. If the agent denies prior work, point it at
~/.claude/projects/*/*.jsonldirectly rather than accepting the denial.
Why It Happened
The trigger is interrupting right as a tool call or plan write finishes. Context compaction (or post-interrupt context reconstruction) appears to diverge from the full session transcript, silently resetting the active window to an earlier point. Because nothing errors, the agent continues as if pre-interrupt work never occurred — and will defend that false state until forced to read its own log.
FAQ
Q1: Did I actually lose my work?
No. The data is intact in ~/.claude/projects/*/*.jsonl and any plan file. Only the agent's live, in-memory context lost it. Recover by referencing the transcript.
Q2: Is this a security vulnerability?
Not a remote exploit, but it's a trust-safety problem: a confident, false denial can send you chasing phantom bugs or re-doing decided work. Treat agent "this never happened" claims as unverified after an interrupt.
Q3: Does this affect other agents?
Any agent that compacts or reconstructs context after an interrupt can exhibit amnesia. Verify continuity by re-stating prior decisions before relying on them.
Your AI tools should work for you, not your budget. Find savings at aiFiesta.
Top comments (0)