Why Claude Code answers nothing at all — and how to tell which of the two causes it is

The symptom

You type a message, press enter, and nothing happens. No answer, no error, no hint. This is the single most reported way of getting stuck, and it has two completely different causes that present in exactly the same way.

Cause 1: you were never signed in

Stock Claude Code must be signed in before it will do anything. If it is not, messages get no reply and no error — the failure is entirely silent, which is why people conclude the tool is broken rather than that they skipped a step.

How to tell: the failure is instant and identical every time, and it happens on the very first message you ever send.

The fix: sign in. In a terminal that means running the CLI and following its prompts. In Clootee, sign-in is a button in the UI: click it, open the link, authorize, and paste the code back. That last detail matters more than it sounds — because the link opens in your browser rather than on the server, it also works when the engine is running on a remote machine, which is the case the terminal flow handles worst.

Cause 2: you cannot reach the provider

The second cause is network: the request leaves and never arrives. Depending on where you are, the provider's endpoint may be unreachable from your connection entirely.

How to tell: there is usually a long pause before nothing happens, rather than an instant nothing. If a VPN changes the behaviour, this was your cause.

The fix — two concrete options, not one:

• Turn on your VPN and re-check.
• Switch to a provider that is reachable from where you are.

Why guessing is the wrong approach

Both causes look like silence, so trial and error is expensive: you can spend an hour fixing the wrong one. What you want is a check that runs before you hit the wall.

That is what Clootee's network check does. It tests connectivity up front, tells you what is wrong and what to do about it, and then only offers providers that actually respond right now — a shorter list you can trust beats a complete list where some entries silently fail. Sign-in state is likewise part of the setup wizard rather than something you are assumed to have done.

The general principle

A silent failure is worse than a loud one. If a long-running tool can be dead while looking fine, it has to say so: the engine crashed, the engine produced zero output, or nothing has happened for far longer than this task should take. Each of those is a distinct state with a distinct next step, and each should be reported as such — with a reason and an action, not a spinner you are asked to trust.

Clootee surfaces all three explicitly. That is less exciting than a feature list, and it is the reason long tasks are usable at all.