Remote Control: session delisted ~10-15 min after viewer disconnect; session ID rotates on reconnect (both undocumented)
Open 💬 0 comments Opened Jul 14, 2026 by flylow3d
Environment
- Claude Code v2.1.207, Windows 11 Pro, host machine always online (verified: no sleep/standby or network-profile disconnect events in Windows event logs during the incident window)
- Session running locally on a home mini-PC, watched/controlled remotely from a work laptop via the session list at claude.ai/code
What happened
- A long-running session was active on the (always-online) host; I was watching it from a browser at work.
- My viewing laptop lost WiFi (left the building). The host machine never lost network.
- The session card at claude.ai/code stayed visible for roughly 10-15 minutes, then disappeared from the list.
- When I looked again from home (~30-40 min later), the session was not in the list at all — even though the CLI process on the host was still running fine and the conversation continued normally when addressed locally.
- Evidence the cloud-side session identity rotated on reconnect: git commits made by the session earlier in the day carry one
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_...URL in their trailers, while the same continuous conversation later reports a different session URL. So the delisted card was never revived — the same local conversation re-registered as a new remote session.
What the docs cover vs. not
The Remote Control docs document a ~10-minute timeout only for the host-side network outage case ('machine is awake but unable to reach the network for more than roughly 10 minutes, the session times out and the process exits'). The behavior above is the viewer-side mirror of that window, and neither it nor the session-ID rotation on reconnect appears in the docs.
Requests
- Document the viewer-disconnect / idle delisting window for the claude.ai/code session list.
- Document (or avoid) session-ID rotation on re-registration — trailers/links stamped with the old session URL go stale mid-conversation.
- Feature request: when the host is still online and the process still running, keep the same card (shown as offline/idle) or provide a re-attach affordance, instead of the card vanishing. The workflow 'watch from the office → commute → resume from home' currently looks like the session died, when in fact only the listing lease expired.