Claude Code ships EndConversation and heartbeats for agents

Claude Code shipped EndConversation in July's release, a tool that lets an agent declare it's finished, per the product's docs.

Both are prerequisites for running Claude Code as a cron job instead of a supervised session. A hung or looping process running unattended used to just sit there burning compute until someone happened to check on it.

Before EndConversation, a finished agent had no clean way to say so, per the docs. It would idle, or loop back into work it had already done, wasting the run.

The same release added progress heartbeats for long-running tasks. A supervising process used to have to guess whether a task was still working or just hung; heartbeats give it a signal instead.

July's release also tightens permission checks and adds prompts before docker commands, according to the docs. It doesn't say whether those prompts fire on workflows that already have docker approved, or on every invocation.