Question: trailing `&` to dispatch a backgrounded prompt — is this a supported feature?
Resolved 💬 1 comment Opened May 10, 2026 by mertcanvural Closed Jun 9, 2026
Hi team — I've seen Boris demonstrate a workflow where appending & to a prompt sends the task to a background agent so the main session keeps working (reference thread). Example:
analyze this codebase and generate docs &
I can't reproduce it on @anthropic-ai/claude-code@2.1.138. The current Interactive Mode docs only list /, !, and @ as input prefixes, and document Ctrl+B / natural-language prompts as the way to background. There's no mention of trailing &.
Three quick questions:
- Is trailing
&an officially supported syntax, or was it an internal/experimental affordance? If supported, which version/flag/setting enables it? - If it isn't supported today, would you consider adding it (or a leading
&prefix, parallel to!) as a first-class way to dispatch background agents from the prompt line? - If neither — what's the canonical, documented way to reproduce Boris's "fire and keep working" flow today?
Ctrl+Bmid-execution and natural-language prompts both work, but they're not as clean as a one-character prefix.
Happy to file separate feature-request issues for #2 if helpful. Just looking for clarity on the intended path. Thanks!
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