Claude Code's "I'll wait for the notification" means your background build already died
appbeforelunch · reddit · 2026-09-16
The author hit a subtle Claude Code failure while building a script-to-video pipeline: the model ran the build as a background command, ended its turn, and claimed it would "wait for the completion notification" — but no notification exists, so the build died with the turn. It happened twice with slightly different wording.
How to spot it: scroll up in the log — if the last real output shows a completed step (e.g. Downloading Chrome Headless Shell - 85.4 Mb/85.4 Mb) followed by silence, look for a sleep loop or Command running in background with ID: .... Any "I'll wait for the notification" variant means nobody is coming.
The fix is one prompt line: "Run the build in the foreground and wait for it, I want to see the file exist." Worth adding to every build prompt: "and actually run it once so I know it works."
Bonus: the underlying hang was Remotion's bundled extract-zip silently stopping after 2 files on macOS ARM, leaving Chrome partially extracted. Claude found it by reading Remotion's source and swapped in system unzip.
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