What
At startup Claude Code checks your organization's settings. Sometimes that check is blocked because your sign-in token, the credential that proves you are logged in, is still being refreshed. Another Claude Code process is often the one refreshing it.
- When the check is blocked with the reason
unavailable_credential_refreshand time remains in its budget (budgetMs), Claude Code waits for one more fetch attempt, then checks again. - If the second check passes, startup goes on, even when nobody is at the terminal.
- In non-interactive mode, the error now says the sign-in token "was still being refreshed, often by another Claude Code process", and tells you to "Run the command again". Before, the unattended path exited straight away with a generic "Retrying" message.
- An older check that read
tengu_lucky_cerfas a list of organizations was replaced by this retry logic.
Nothing has been read about the flag's actual value.
Why
Running several Claude Code processes at once, or running it in scripts, should hit fewer spurious startup failures. When a failure still happens, the message tells you to run the command again.
tengu_lucky_cerf Not enough to sayNothing here resolved what this flag was doing on this version, so nothing here should be read as on or off.
This account: no value returned · anonymous baseline: no value returned · compiled default in v2.1.307: not a boolean we can read
These values were read against a different version of Claude Code, so treat them as the nearest reading available instead of one taken on this release.
Read once, for one account on one subscription tier, against v2.1.307. It isn't a statement about your account. What a flag value here can and cannot tell you