App restart after update loses session — no in-app way to resume

Resolved 💬 1 comment Opened Apr 22, 2026 by derekbeda Closed May 27, 2026

Filing this as a feature request, but honestly it feels like a bug — it's a very annoying one.

What happens:
I'm working on code inside the Claude Code desktop app. An update becomes available and the app shows a Restart button. I click Restart. After the app comes back up, I'm dropped into a fresh session with no visible way to resume where I left off — no session picker, no "recent sessions" list, no draft recovery for whatever I was typing.

Every single time this happens, I lose 15+ minutes and burn tokens re-orienting a new Claude to the project, the worktree, and what I was about to do. Any prompt I was composing is gone if my clipboard didn't have it.

Current workaround (shouldn't be required):
Close the app, open a terminal, cd to the right worktree, and run claude --resume to get a session picker. That works — which proves the session data is preserved — but it's a CLI escape hatch, not a product experience.

What I'd expect from a persistent-agent app:

  1. On launch after an update, either auto-resume the last session or show a "Resume previous session?" prompt.
  2. A visible Recent Sessions / History entry in the app UI, so resume is never more than a click away.
  3. Draft recovery: whatever was in the input box before restart should still be there. Losing an in-progress prompt to an update is the worst part.

The session files already live in ~/.claude/projects/ and survive the update. The data's there. The app just doesn't surface it post-restart.

Environment: macOS (Darwin 24.6.0), Claude Code desktop app, Opus 4.7.

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