Can no longer tell Claude to change its working directory mid-session (regression)

Note: This supersedes #42837, which was filed with an inaccurate description. I cannot edit or close that issue.

Description

It used to be possible to tell Claude Code to change its working directory mid-session (e.g., "change dir to ~/") and it would update the session's working directory for all tools — Bash, Read, Glob, Grep, Edit, etc. This no longer works.

Now when Claude attempts to change directories via the Bash tool, the session cwd is immediately reset back to the project root with the message:

Shell cwd was reset to /Users/.../original-project-root

All subsequent tool calls continue to operate from the original project directory regardless.

How It Used to Work

1. User tells Claude: "change dir to ~/" (or any path)
2. Claude runs cd ~/ && pwd via Bash
3. The Claude Code harness detects the new cwd and updates the session's working directory
4. All subsequent tool calls (Read, Glob, Grep, Bash, etc.) resolve paths from the new directory

This is confirmed by 51+ instances across my past conversation logs where this behavior worked correctly with the same configuration.

Current Behavior

1. User tells Claude: "change dir to ~/"
2. Claude runs cd ~/ && pwd — output shows /Users/username
3. Immediately: Shell cwd was reset to /Users/.../original-project-root
4. All subsequent tool calls remain in the original project directory
5. The directory change does not take effect

Expected Behavior

Per the official docs (Bash tool behavior):

"Working directory persists across commands. Set CLAUDE_BASH_MAINTAIN_PROJECT_WORKING_DIR=1 to reset to the project directory after each command."

The default should be persistence — the env var is the opt-in to reset. CLAUDE_BASH_MAINTAIN_PROJECT_WORKING_DIR is not set in my environment.

Environment

• OS: macOS (Darwin 25.3.0)
• Claude Code: Latest version
• Shell: zsh
• CLAUDE_BASH_MAINTAIN_PROJECT_WORKING_DIR: Not set
• Custom statusLine: Yes — but was also present in prior sessions where changing directories worked fine

Relationship to #31471

May be related to #31471 (statusLine resetting cwd), but the key difference: this is a regression. The same statusLine config was in place when this capability worked. Something in a recent update broke the ability to tell Claude "switch to a different directory" and have the entire session context move there.

Impact

This breaks a core workflow — switching between project directories mid-conversation. Users who work across multiple repos or need to navigate to different locations must restart Claude Code from the target directory, or manually prefix every command with cd /path &&.