[BUG] AskUserQuestion: choosing "chat about it" erases the question and all its options from the transcript

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

Note on the preflight box: this was reported before, in #26885 (Feb 2026, v2.1.47). That issue was never fixed — it was auto-closed as stale on 2026-03-19. I'm re-filing rather than commenting there because the bug still reproduces on 2.1.231, and a closed+stale issue is unlikely to be seen. Happy to have this merged back into #26885 if you'd rather reopen that one.

What's Wrong?

When Claude asks a question with numbered options (the AskUserQuestion UI — usually with one marked "Recommended"), the last choice is a free-text / "let's chat about this" escape hatch. Picking it erases the whole question block from the transcript: the question text, all the option labels, and all the option descriptions vanish and cannot be scrolled back to.

The reason this hurts is the specific situation it happens in. You pick "chat about it" precisely because you want to talk about the options that were just on screen — ask what option 2 actually means, compare it against option 3, ask why the recommended one was recommended. But the moment you press it, the thing you wanted to discuss is gone. So you're now trying to have a conversation about a list you can no longer see, from memory, and by then you have usually already half-forgotten the exact wording of the four choices.

It also means there's no way to copy an option's label or description into your reply to point at it unambiguously.

Every other outcome of that widget keeps a record: pick option 1 and the transcript shows what you picked. Only the "I want to discuss this" path — the one where you most need the context to stay put — throws the context away.

What Should Happen?

After choosing the free-text / "chat about it" option, the question and its options should stay in the transcript in a read-only (or collapsed-but-expandable) form, the same way a selected answer is retained.

Concretely, something like:

? Which approach should I use?
  1. Rewrite the parser      — clean, but touches 8 files
  2. Patch the tokenizer     — smaller diff, leaves the root cause  (Recommended)
  3. Skip for now
  › you chose: chat about it

so the follow-up conversation can actually refer to "option 2" and both sides can still see what option 2 says.

Error Messages/Logs

n/a — UI behavior, no error output

Steps to Reproduce

1. Get Claude to ask a question with options — e.g. start a task ambiguous enough that it calls AskUserQuestion, or ask it directly: ask me a multiple-choice question about how to structure this project
2. When the numbered options appear, choose the last entry (the free-text / "chat about this" option) instead of one of the listed choices.
3. The question and every option disappear from the conversation view.
4. Scroll up — they are not anywhere in the transcript. There is no way to get them back.

Claude Model

Opus

Is this a regression?

No, this never worked

Last Working Version

_No response_

Claude Code Version

2.1.231 (Claude Code)

Platform

Anthropic API

Operating System

Ubuntu/Debian Linux

Terminal/Shell

Other

Additional Information

• Ubuntu 26.04, terminal is herdr over SSH. #26885 hit the same thing on Windows/PowerShell, so it doesn't look terminal-specific.
• Prior report: #26885 (closed as stale, not fixed).
• Related-but-different reports about this widget losing surrounding context: #84065, #80576, #74237.