Claude Keeper

I run two copies of the Claude desktop app on each Mac, one signed in to my work account and one to my personal account, with the second copy made by Parall. That works until Claude updates itself. Both copies run the same binary, so the update installer waits for both to quit, and the copy that quit first to install the update stays gone, sometimes for hours.

Claude Keeper finishes the update instead. It knows that an instance quit for an update because Claude leaves an update-attempt file behind when it does. It then waits until nobody has touched the keyboard or mouse for five minutes and none of the Claude Code sessions in the other instances are busy, and quits those. Once the new version is installed, it relaunches every instance on the macOS desktop where its window last lived. An instance that I quit myself stays quit.

It’s a small Mac app: you go through a setup window once, and after that the keeper runs in the background, without a window or a Dock icon. The whole story, including the two designs that didn’t work, is in the blog post.