JetBrains plugin loses connection after IDE sleeps

Symptoms

After OS sleep or long inactivity, the Claude Code tool window in IntelliJ/PyCharm stops responding: messages you type appear locally but the agent never answers, file diffs stop appearing in the IDE, and the status dot stays green the whole time. The underlying claude process is alive (visible in Activity Monitor, and attaching from a terminal works). Only the IDE bridge is dead. Restarting the whole IDE fixes it, which people do dozens of times a week.

Likely cause

The plugin's local websocket to the CLI doesn't survive the network stack coming back from sleep, and there's no heartbeat/reconnect loop — it only detects disconnection on write failure, and the UI writes go into a buffer that never flushes. Hence the zombie state with a green status dot.

Affected

plugin builds paired with CLI 2.3.5 – 2.4.1; JetBrains 2025.1 and 2025.2

Environments

IntelliJ IDEA, PyCharm, WebStorm with the Claude Code plugin · macOS mainly; some Linux (suspend) reports

Confidence

High confidence · verified Aug 2, 2026

Reconnect the plugin without restarting the IDE

You don't need to restart the IDE. The plugin re-establishes its bridge if you toggle it, and you can make the zombie state much rarer by disabling the IDE's power-save throttling of background threads.

01

When it happens: close the Claude Code tool window entirely (not minimize), then reopen it from the right sidebar. This tears down and re-dials the websocket. Session state is preserved — the CLI kept running.

02

If the toggle doesn't take, restart just the plugin connection via the action popup:

Cmd+Shift+A  →  "Claude Code: Restart Connection"

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