[DOCS] Agent view `Needs input` row can flip back to `Working` after a turn that produced no readable text

Documentation Type

Incorrect/outdated documentation

Documentation Location

https://code.claude.com/docs/en/agent-view

Section/Topic

• The "Read session state" subsection (the table that lists what each row icon means).
• The "Version history" table at the bottom of agent-view.md, which currently stops at v2.1.203 and has no v2.1.205 row.

Current Documentation

From https://code.claude.com/docs/en/agent-view, the "Read session state" section defines each row state only in terms of what the icon means when the state is set. The relevant rows:

| State | Icon shows as | What it means | | :---------- | :------------ | :----------------------------------------------------------------------- | | Working | Animated | Claude is actively running tools or generating a response | | Needs input | Yellow | Claude is waiting on a specific question or permission decision from you | | Idle | Dimmed | The session has nothing to do and is ready for your next prompt | | Completed | Green | The task finished successfully | | Failed | Red | The task ended with an error | | Stopped | Grey | The session was stopped with Ctrl+X or claude stop |

The "Organize the list" section names the Needs input group again:

Agent view groups sessions so the ones that need input are at the top, with Ready for review and Needs input above Working and Completed. These group names don't map one-to-one to the states above: a session moves to Ready for review when it has an open pull request, and Completed collects finished, failed, and stopped sessions together.

The Version history table at the bottom of the page stops at v2.1.203:

| v2.1.203 | A gateway ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL exported in the dispatching shell reaches the sessions dispatched from it into that same directory when the supervisor shares that gateway environment, instead of being dropped while the API key exported alongside it was kept. ... |

Nothing in the "Read session state" table or anywhere else on the page describes when a row leaves the Needs input state, what an "empty turn" means for the row, or how the v2.1.205 fix changes that transition.

What's Wrong or Missing?

A. The Read session state table describes what each state means, never how a row leaves Needs input

The Needs input row says the icon means "Claude is waiting on a specific question or permission decision from you." Nothing on the page tells the reader what clears that state — for example, that the icon should return to Working once the user replies through the peek panel or the inline reply input. With the v2.1.205 fix, an extra condition is part of the correct transition: a turn that ended without readable text from the agent must not be treated as the agent taking over the work again, so the row should stay in Needs input instead of reverting to Working. Neither the original transition nor the empty-turn edge case is documented.

B. The v2.1.205 row is missing from the Version history table

The Version history table at the bottom of agent-view.md lists its most recent row as v2.1.203 and skips directly from there down through v2.1.202, v2.1.200, and earlier. The fix for the empty-turn state flip therefore has no row, so a reader using the version history to understand what changed cannot tell that v2.1.205 changed the empty-turn transition.

Suggested Improvement

Extend the Needs input row of the Read session state table to describe the corrected transition, and add a v2.1.205 row to the Version history table at the bottom of the page.

Before (only the Needs input row is shown; the rest of the table is unchanged):

| Needs input | Yellow | Claude is waiting on a specific question or permission decision from you |

After:

| Needs input | Yellow | Claude is waiting on a specific question or permission decision from you. The icon returns to Working when you reply through the peek panel or the inline reply input, or to Idle when the session has nothing left to do. {/ min-version: 2.1.205 /}As of v2.1.205, a turn that ends with no readable text from the agent (for example, a response that produced only tool calls and no prose) does not flip the row back to Working. Before v2.1.205, an empty-text turn was treated as the agent resuming work, so a row that should have stayed Needs input momentarily reverted to Working until the next state update. |

Before (Version history table currently stops at v2.1.203):

| v2.1.203 | {/ min-version: 2.1.203 /}A gateway ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL exported in the dispatching shell reaches the sessions dispatched from it into that same directory when the supervisor shares that gateway environment, instead of being dropped while the API key exported alongside it was kept. ... |

After (insert a new v2.1.205 row above the v2.1.203 row; everything else unchanged):

| v2.1.205 | {/ min-version: 2.1.205 /}A background session row that was in Needs input no longer flips back to Working when the agent's turn contains no readable text. The row stays Needs input until the user actually replies or the session reaches a real terminal state. |

Impact

Medium - Makes feature difficult to understand

Additional Context

Affected Pages:

| Page | Context |
|------|---------|
| https://code.claude.com/docs/en/agent-view | Read session state table for the Needs input row, and the Version history table at the bottom of the page |

Total scope: 1 page affected.

The fix is in Claude Code v2.1.205. The state-machine change is most visible to users who have asked an agent a question and then received a tool-only turn (no prose text), which on v2.1.204 and earlier briefly showed Working instead of Needs input. The page's "Read session state" table does not currently describe how a row leaves the Needs input state, so the corrected transition deserves an inline min-version: 2.1.205 note alongside the row. The Version history table should also gain a row that names the fix so a reader using the page as a per-version changelog can find it.