Feature Request: Support for spawning fresh-context sessions from Stop hooks

Summary

Request for a mechanism to spawn a fresh Claude session (with cleared context) from within a Stop hook. This is needed to implement the original Ralph Wiggum technique correctly.

Background

The original Ralph technique uses an external Bash loop:

while :; do cat PROMPT.md | npx --yes @sourcegraph/amp ; done

Each iteration is a new process with fresh context. The ralph-wiggum plugin attempts to replicate this using Stop hooks, but currently the context accumulates instead of resetting.

The Problem

Stop hooks run in a non-terminal context (-t 0 is always false), making it impossible to:

• Spawn an interactive claude process
• Access /dev/tty for terminal I/O
• Start a new session that takes over the terminal

We tried:

nohup claude "$PROMPT" </dev/tty >/dev/tty 2>&1 &

This fails because the hook has no TTY access.

Proposed Solutions

Option A: New Hook Return Field

Allow Stop hooks to return a field that signals "spawn fresh session":

{
  "decision": "block",
  "spawnFreshSession": true,
  "freshSessionPrompt": "The prompt for the new session",
  "freshSessionSystemMessage": "Optional system message"
}

Claude Code would then:

1. End the current session
2. Start a new session with fresh context
3. Inject the provided prompt as the first user message

Option B: CLI Flag

Add a flag like --fresh-context or --clear-on-start:

claude --fresh-context "prompt here"

This would start a completely fresh session (no conversation history) but with the given prompt.

Option C: Session Control API

Expose an API or hook mechanism to control session context:

• Clear context between iterations
• Query current context size
• Trigger context compaction

Use Cases

1. Ralph Wiggum loops - Iterative AI development with fresh context each iteration
2. Long-running tasks - Prevent context overflow on tasks with many iterations
3. Reproducible testing - Ensure each run starts from clean state

Related

• Plugin issue: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-plugins-official/issues/125
• Closed PR attempt: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-plugins-official/pull/126
• Original technique: https://ghuntley.com/ralph/

Environment

• Claude Code version: 2.0.76+
• Plugin: ralph-wiggum