Every one of these said a switch leaves running sessions alone - that they keep
talking to the old provider until restarted. That is wrong, and reassuring in
exactly the wrong direction: a switch breaks them.
The static half of the config does behave as described. Base URL, model ids and
the env block are read once at startup and a running session keeps what it
started with.
The credential is not. It comes from running apiKeyHelper, which Claude Code
re-invokes on a timer - CLAUDE_CODE_API_KEY_HELPER_TTL_MS is present in the
2.1.251 binary - and claude-key-helper.sh answers for whatever state.json says at
that moment. So the switch reaches into a live session through the one part that
was never cached. Into anthropic, the helper returns nothing by design and the
next refresh comes back with no credential; into another provider, it hands over
the new key while the session is still pointed at the old base URL, which
rejects it. Either way the session starts failing calls whenever the TTL happens
to expire, mid-turn as easily as between turns.
One case does survive, and is now stated rather than glossed: switching between
two presets of the same provider that share a keyRef keeps the same key and the
same endpoint, so the session carries on with the model ids it started with.
The claim in "Restarting sessions" predates this work - it came in with the
Windows build - but it is wrong for the same reason and is corrected too.
GLM 5.3 supersedes 5.2, so every reference to the older id follows it: the zai
preset's opus, sonnet and fable tiers, and the fable tier of `default`, which
routes to the same model through OpenRouter.
Also the hardcoded Z.AI entries in both builds' model pickers, which are the one
place a model id is not read from a preset - leaving those would have gone on
offering a superseded model from the menu while the presets used the new one.
haiku stays on glm-4.7: that is the fast/cheap tier, not a 5.x.
Four changes to the POSIX build, found while getting it working on Omarchy.
Colour follows the desktop theme. The sixteen ANSI slots carry no guarantee
about relative brightness and monochrome themes exploit that: under Omarchy's
Solitude, slot 36 (headings) resolves to #707070 and slot 31 (FAIL) to #565d60,
which against #cacccc body text on a #101315 ground is 3.8:1 and 2.8:1 where the
body text is 11.6:1. Headings rendered as fine print and errors as the quietest
thing on screen. The palette is now derived from the theme's own colors.toml,
with each role measured against the background it will actually be drawn on and
lifted toward the foreground when it falls short - hue kept where the theme has
any, weight substituted where it does not. Headings go 3.8:1 -> 9.4:1 and FAIL
2.8:1 -> 5.2:1. Falls back to the ANSI slots off Omarchy, with the two roles the
slots get wrong corrected.
health.json was only ever written by a switch, so a fresh install had none at
all and any reader had to guess. It is now refreshed by `status` and seeded at
install, and `claude-mode health` forces it. The installer also copies VERSION,
which cm_version() has always read and nothing ever wrote - every health.json
until now reported 0.0.0.
Preflight, because a switch that cannot work does not fail loudly: it succeeds,
and every session started afterwards breaks in a way that points at Claude Code
rather than at here. Keys, the helper, the preset's provider and the server are
all checked before the write. LM Studio is the sharp case - its token is an
inline placeholder, so nothing about the switch needs the server to exist.
Session control, because Claude Code reads settings.json once at startup: a
switch leaves running sessions on the old provider until they are restarted, and
one mid-request can lose that turn outright. `sessions` lists them, `--stop` and
`--restart` act on them behind a confirmation, `--dry-run` shows the plan.
Sessions are found through /proc/<pid>/exe rather than by process name, which
would sweep up every shell that merely mentions claude - including the one this
runs from. Two exclusions: the calling session, and forks of a session. A busy
session spawns children off its own binary that inherit the same exe, and
without filtering those the count climbed and fell with load - it read 2, 5, 11
and 40 for the same two sessions before the parent check went in.
LM Studio is no longer assumed to be on this machine. `preset url` and
`preset auth` move it to a LAN box, a tunnel or a proxy and turn authentication
on, and the probe distinguishes ok / auth / notfound / refused, because "start
the server" and "your key is wrong" are opposite remedies. It is probed wherever
it lives - a sleeping LAN box is exactly as absent as an empty loopback port -
while remote gateways are not, since those being briefly unreachable is the
network's problem and a missing key never fixes itself.
Source of truth so far has been c:\Users\smoido\projects\cli on the Windows
box, which has no git history of its own. This is that tree copied verbatim over
SSH, minus dist/ - the PowerShell build, the POSIX port under linux/, and the
presets both share.
Recorded as its own commit so that everything after it is a reviewable diff
rather than an undifferentiated first drop.
smoido