AskUserQuestion widget hides Claude's preceding text message in VS Code extension
Title
AskUserQuestion widget hides Claude's preceding text message in VS Code extension
Environment
- Claude Code VS Code extension: anthropic.claude-code@2.1.218
- Claude Code CLI: 2.1.147
- OS: macOS (Darwin 25.5.0)
Description
When Claude outputs an explanatory text message and then calls the AskUserQuestion tool right after, the text message written immediately before the question gets hidden/collapsed in the VS Code chat panel once the question widget renders. This text often contains the context, tradeoffs, or reasoning the user needs in order to answer the question well — losing it at exactly the moment it's needed undermines the point of asking.
Steps to Reproduce
- In the VS Code extension, prompt Claude with a task where it will naturally explain some context/tradeoffs in prose, then ask a clarifying question via
AskUserQuestion. - Observe that once the question widget renders, the preceding explanatory text is no longer visible in the panel.
Expected Behavior
The text Claude wrote immediately before an AskUserQuestion call should remain visible alongside (or clearly accessible near) the question widget, since it typically contains the context needed to answer.
Scrolling works, but sometime the text used by the AskUserQuestion is so large that there is no space on the window to look at text at all.
Actual Behavior
The preceding text message is hidden/collapsed when the question widget appears.
Impact
Users are forced to answer questions without the context Claude just provided, or must dig/scroll to try to recover it, which defeats the purpose of explaining before asking.
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3 Comments
Same on Windows, native extension.
Same on the claude code terminal ( CLI ) , mac os...
Still happening on anthropic.claude-code 2.1.283 (alpine-arm64, VS Code Remote on a Raspberry Pi 4 running Home Assistant OS).
It's intermittent but frequent: 4+ times across two sessions (2026-09-23 and 2026-09-27). Each time the explanation or comparison table Claude wrote was not visible while the question widget was open, so I answered with "you did a comparison but didn't report any findings" / "I can't see your recommendations".
What seems to avoid it: if the assistant's text is followed by another tool call (any tool) before the AskUserQuestion call, the text shows normally. A tool call earlier in the same turn, before the text, doesn't help. The text has to be the last thing rendered before the widget for it to get hidden.
Related: the option preview field also didn't render for me once, which matches #95228.