I kept giving Claude Code long task lists, stepping away, and coming back to find it had completed the easy parts and stopped before the difficult ones.
Sometimes it was worse.
Claude would work until 2 AM, ask one non-critical question, and then sit idle for six hours until I woke up at 8.
The question was usually reasonable, but it was not truly blocking. Claude could have chosen a safe default, continued working, and left the decision for me to review later.
That is a harness problem, not only a model problem. The layer around the agent loop decides what “done” means, when the run may stop, and what happens when human input is unavailable.
