What
The instructions Claude gets when a loop wakes it up now depend on the situation:
- in brief mode, where plain reply text counts as unread, Claude is told to send updates through the
SendMessagetool markedstatus: 'proactive' - on models where the turn ends as soon as the tool returns, Claude is told to write the update before the call
The tool that lists other sessions has a separate description for when this session has no SendMessage tool. It says this session cannot message them but they can still message it. When a message from another session arrives, the reminder Claude sees now also changes if SendMessage is missing.
Why
Loop updates could go unseen before. They were written as plain text in brief mode, or written after the tool call that ended the turn.
Names in the bundle/loop
The entry above is what we published on the day. These lines were added later, as Anthropic's own pages caught up, and they sit beside the original rather than replacing it.
Confirmed since
Anthropic's documentation has since written up /loop, on Hooks reference.
* A [scheduled task](/docs/en/scheduled-tasks) firing, including a `/loop` iterationhooks see the edit
Added since
A small documentation edit on Run prompts on a schedule touched a line naming /loop after this was published.
* When you resume a session with `claude --resume` or `claude --continue`, Claude Code restores the tasks scheduled with `CronCreate`, except recurring tasks that have [expired](#seven-day-expiry) and one-shot tasks whose scheduled time ha…scheduled-tasks see the edit
Two sources agreeTwo things we can check say the same as this entry.
Anthropic's documentation agrees
A small documentation edit on Run prompts on a schedule touched a line naming /loop after this was published.
Anthropic's release notes agree
Fixed sessions launched without the SendMessage tool (such as by Claude Desktop) still being told to message other sessions with it