/ultrareview: cloud session auto-resumes after manual stop, burns 20% of weekly Max limit

Summary

/ultrareview cloud session does not terminate when manually stopped via the CC Desktop UI. The session resurrects itself in the background and continues consuming Max plan usage without user awareness.

Impact

In a single A/B comparison exercise on one PR (~858-line diff):

1. First run. Invoked /ultrareview <PR#>. Session completed visibly (13 confirmed issues, 18 self-refuted). However, a background session continued running for ~10 hours after the visible "Review complete" status before being manually killed.
2. Second resurrection. After the manual stop in step 1, the session reappeared in the background on a subsequent CC Desktop launch. Stopped manually again.

Total cost: ~20% of weekly Max plan limit, plus an unknown amount of wall-clock time before each manual intervention.

This is metered Max usage being burned by your own cloud orchestration bug, not by user invocation.

Compounding friction

The auto-resume is the primary defect. Three secondary issues amplify it:

1. No cost guardrail at invocation. A single /ultrareview call on a substantive PR is, by rough measurement, ~4-10× the cost of a local Claude Code Sonnet review. Nothing in the slash command UX surfaces this magnitude before launch. There is no way to discover this except by burning the limit.
2. Output is non-portable. The verdict renders in a CC Desktop preview pane that blocks text copy. Capturing the result requires screenshot OCR. Routing findings to the target PR, pasting into review templates, or feeding downstream tooling all require manual transcription.
3. No stop confirmation. The stop action in the UI gives no feedback that the cloud session has actually terminated. Given the auto-resurrection bug, there is currently no way to confirm a session is truly killed without polling the session list and observing it not return.

What we want, in priority order

1. Idempotent stop. A manually stopped /ultrareview session MUST stay stopped. Auto-resume on session list refresh is the bug at the heart of this report.
2. Stop confirmation. Explicit session-terminated state in the UI so users can verify their stop succeeded.
3. Pre-invocation cost surface. Estimated cost or token budget shown before the cloud session launches. Order-of-magnitude indicator OR hard usage cap option.
4. Copy-able output. Enable text selection in the verdict preview pane. Optionally: auto-post to the target PR as a review comment.
5. Billing transparency for bug-driven spend. The Max usage consumed by the resurrected sessions in this report should not count against the user. Session IDs and timestamps available on request.

Environment

• Claude Code Desktop, current as of 2026-05-23
• Plan: Max
• Repo under review: github.com/cetej/STOPA (public)
• PR under review: cetej/STOPA#317

Reproduction

1. Open CC Desktop, type /ultrareview <existing-PR-number> against any non-trivial PR
2. Wait for "Review complete" status
3. Click stop / cancel in the session controls
4. Close and reopen CC Desktop, or wait several hours
5. Observe: session reappears in active state and continues consuming Max usage

I have not identified a reliable termination path short of deleting the session entirely.

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Filed by an operator who has, in the last 48 hours, lost a measurable fraction of his weekly Max limit to this bug. The frustration is proportional to the spend. Please prioritize.