Claude Code 2.1.144: Background Sessions Now Show Up in /resume

On May 19, Anthropic shipped Claude Code v2.1.144. The headline change is small but fixes a real annoyance: background sessions — the ones you started with --bg or sent off from agent view — now show up in /resume alongside your interactive sessions, marked with a bg tag.

Before this release, background sessions lived in their own world. You started them, peeked at status from agent view, but if you ran /resume you only saw the chats you had been actively typing into. That meant background work was invisible to the muscle memory most of us use to switch contexts.

What Changed in /resume

Running /resume now shows a unified picker. Interactive sessions appear first, then background sessions with a bg tag next to the timestamp. Selecting a background session pulls it into the foreground — the agent stops running headless and you can interact with it directly. You can also pop it back to the background with another /bg toggle.

/resume
# picker now shows:
#   2026-05-21 14:22  refactor auth module
#   2026-05-21 13:10  add unit tests for parser   [bg]
#   2026-05-21 09:45  fix flaky CI run

The Session-Only /model Default

The same release changed how /model behaves. It is now session-only by default. If you switch from Opus 4.7 to Haiku 4.5 mid-task, the change only applies to that session — open a new one and you're back to your global default. This matters because the old behavior silently changed your global default and surprised people on the next launch.

If you actually do want to set a new default for every future session, press d in the model picker. That writes it to your settings. The picker shows which choice is the session pick versus the persisted default, so there's no ambiguity.

The 15-Second API Timeout Fix

There was a bug in 2.1.143 where Claude Code would hang for 75 seconds at startup if the Anthropic API was unreachable — bad WiFi, corporate firewall, expired credentials. The CLI would just sit there, looking like it was thinking, until a hardcoded TCP timeout fired. v2.1.144 drops that to 15 seconds and surfaces a clearer error.

If you've ever opened Claude Code on a plane or behind a captive portal and given up before it told you why, that's gone now. You'll see a network error in 15 seconds and can fix it.

Other Fixes Worth Knowing

The release ships with more than 40 bug fixes. A few stand out: a macOS Full Disk Access crash that hit users with file vault enabled, terminal rendering corruption that scrambled the prompt area on some iTerm2 themes, and MCP paginated tools/list returning truncated tool inventories. Also, "extra usage" got renamed to "usage credits" across the CLI to match the wording on the billing dashboard.

The Real Upgrade Reason

If you run background sessions regularly — and after the agent view release in 2.1.139, more people do — this version makes them feel like first-class work. You don't lose track of what's running. You don't need a separate window. /resume is the one switcher you already know, and it now sees everything.

# Upgrade Claude Code
claude update

# Confirm version
claude --version
# Expected: 2.1.144 or higher