Enter key in Claude Code Desktop chat window can inadvertently stop all background agents
Preflight Checklist
- [x] I have searched existing issues and this hasn't been reported yet
- [x] This is a single bug report (please file separate reports for different bugs)
- [x] I am using the latest version of Claude Code
What's Wrong?
One accidental click on the stop button in the chat window of Claude Code (desktop), when the chat window has an empty input box, kills every concurrent background agent. This is unexpended.
Dynamically toggling the action of that UI button between "Send" and "Stop All" is confusing and makes it too easy to cancel significant work that's underway.
In my case, it killed 7 running tasks, three of which had unpushed commits, losing work and requiring a restart on all the subagents / parallel threads. It takes awhile to dispatch all your agents, its a big loss when that work is shut down prematurely. I'm still not sure the work that was underway was fully restored.
Overloaded the chat "Send" button with "Stop All" makes it too easy for a user to accidentally shut down all their running agents, because the button's role toggles between Stop and Send depending on if there's text in the chat window.
What Should Happen?
Claude Code (desktop) should provide some sort of confirmation before stopping your entire suite of running background agents and tasks. We can already stop each individual task using the stop buttons on them. Maybe a better way to Stop All is to have a stop all button in the Background tasks window, not dynamically toggle the chat "Send" button functionality
Error Messages/Logs
Steps to Reproduce
- Start up a team of subagents, dispatching your sub agents across branches and work trees
- Go down to the chat window to add some text
- Accidentally click the Enter / Stop button in that window before you add text in the chat
- Your entire subagent team shuts down immediately, losing all the uncommitted work that was underway
Claude Model
Not sure / Multiple models
Is this a regression?
No, this never worked
Last Working Version
_No response_
Claude Code Version
2.1.223
Platform
Anthropic API
Operating System
Windows
Terminal/Shell
Other
Additional Information
Am using Claude Code (Desktop) on Windows
This bug is about the Desktop UI, not the API