So, I- I was working on this really heavy local build in the shed last night,
right, and just as the background agent was about to finish...
poof.
Just, uh, completely vanished.
No warning, just a nasty socket error and my terminal went dead silent.
Oh, the socket error.
I know that exact pain.
You leave a Claude Code run going, and it silently eats up your local RAM until the
OS kernel just, you know, aggressively terminates the process.
Spot on.
It's like a kangaroo loose in the paddock, just chewing through everything until the
system crashes.
But, the, the new releases, v2.1.195 and v2.1.193, they're
actually targeting this exact background daemon fragility.
Wait, v2.1.195?
What are they doing differently with the daemons under the hood now?
Well, they've built in this automatic memory-pressure reaping.
So, if you have these idle background shells just sitting there doing nothing,
instead of letting them hoard your RAM, the system automatically reaps them.
And they added self-healing control sockets for the agent daemon itself.
Self-healing control sockets...
okay, so if the socket connection actually drops or gets interrupted,
it doesn't just bail and crash the whole agent task anymore?
It recovers?
Exactly.
It heals itself and keeps the task ticking over in the background.
But, say you're like me and you're running, I don't know, a local database or a
persistent test runner in one of those background shells...
you might not want the system to aggressively reap it when your RAM gets tight.
Yeah, definitely.
If I'm running a local hot-reloading server, the last thing I want is the agent
memory controller quietly killing my dev server process.
Is there a way to, like, opt out of that?
Yep.
They gave us a new environment variable.
You just set CLAUDE_CODE_DISABLE_BG_SHELL_PRESSURE_REAP=1 and it flags those shells
to stay alive, no matter how much memory pressure the OS is screaming about.
CLAUDE_CODE_DISABLE_BG_SHELL_PRESSURE_REAP=1.
That is a massive relief for persistent local services.
It actually lets us run long-lived agent loops without babying the terminal.
Too right.
And, oh, they snuck in this other tiny feature that I'm already using constantly.
In bash mode, if you type an exclamation mark-just a single !-it instantly triggers
file path autocompletion.
No way, just the exclamation mark?
That is so much faster than constantly hitting tab or typing out deeply nested
directories while you're trying to guide the agent.
Mate, it's brilliant.
Makes navigating the project structure feel incredibly snappy.
Good to see them hardening the plumbing while making the actual developer UX a bit
smoother.
Yeah, keeping those background processes stable makes a huge difference.
Glad they've sorted this out.