What
When a session is connected remotely, Claude Code keeps a saved record of the conversation, called the transcript. Catching that record up used to be a single attempt: if it failed, Claude Code logged the failure and started writing the transcript anyway. Now:
- Catching up runs as a loop that retries, and ends as caught up, retried, late or fell behind.
- If catching up fails, Claude Code does not start writing the transcript.
- Filling in earlier history (backfill) is refused when the transcript contains an entry asking for history to be hidden.
- Messages that were kept after compaction, which is when older conversation is summarised to save space, are protected during backfill.
Why
The saved history of a remote session should be more reliable, and history that was meant to stay hidden is not written back in.