Make Claude Code wait for your answer again

Today Claude Code ran away from me. I was pairing with it, it asked me one of those "which approach do you want?" questions with a few options, and I took a few seconds to actually think about it. By the time I looked back, it had already picked an answer and was off doing the work.

Woot? I never chose anything.

Fine, weird glitch, whatever. Except a few minutes later it did it again. Asked, waited a beat, answered its own question, carried on. And then a third time. At that point I stopped assuming I was crazy and started digging.

Turns out this isn't a bug but a new feature that was enabled behind our backs! If you don't answer one of Claude Code's question prompts within 60 seconds, it now just picks for you and keeps going — "away from keyboard" mode, apparently.

Sixty seconds. That's the window I'm allowed to think before the agent decides on my behalf. I've spent longer than that picking a lunch order.

How to turn "away from keyboard" mode off

One line, in your user settings at ~/.claude/settings.json:

{
  "askUserQuestionTimeout": "never"
}

Restart Claude Code and it'll wait for your answer again — as long as you need, no countdown.

A few notes so you don't waste time like I did:

• It accepts "60s", "5m", "10m", or "never". Want the safety net but hate the twitchiness? Set "5m" instead.
• It's read from user settings only — not your project or local, ~/.claude/settings.json only.
• You need Claude Code v2.1.200 or later.
• Prefer clicking? It's in /config under Question auto-continue
• Check out Docs if you want to know what else can be tweaked.

That's the whole fix. One line, and Claude Code goes back to actually waiting for me.

Thanks, Anthropic. What a stupid new feature.