When Claude is mid-task in Claude Code, you used to have two options if you had a question: interrupt it and risk derailing whatever it was in the middle of, or wait until it’s done. If you’re anything like me, you’ve had twelve “hold on, what was that” moments in a single Claude run and just let every one of them go. /btw adds a third option: a side conversation that doesn’t touch whatever Claude is working on.
HOW /BTW WORKS
Type /btw followed by your question while Claude is actively working. It opens a side conversation in read-only mode, so Claude can answer your question but can’t run tools, edit files, or do anything that would mess with the work in progress. When you dismiss it, it disappears completely and nothing gets saved to your main chat history, which means it’s purely for asking, not for feeding Claude additional context or steering it mid-task. If you need to actually redirect Claude, you’ll still need to interrupt or wait.
WHY READ-ONLY If the side conversation could edit files while the main task is also editing files, you’d get conflicts and overwrites. Read-only keeps the two threads from stepping on each other.
GOOD FOR QUICK QUESTIONS, NOT DEEP INVESTIGATION
It’s useful when you’re watching Claude work and want to understand something it’s doing, need a quick “what does this mean” answer, or want to check whether to let Claude continue down a path or course-correct. If your question requires Claude to actually read files, run commands, or do any real investigation, /btw can’t help since it’s read-only. For that you’ll need to interrupt with Escape, wait for the current task to finish, or open a second terminal session.
WHERE IT WORKS Claude Code CLI only, as of March 2026. Not available in Claude Desktop or claude.ai.