Restoring a Broken Hyprland Session from TTY3 with Claude Code

I run CachyOS with a custom Hyprland desktop. It's fast, it's mine, and every so often something on the bleeding edge breaks in a way that locks me out of my session.

Today it was hyprlock dying mid-session, leaving the compositor stuck in a locked state with no way to authenticate back in. Hyprland was kind enough to print recovery instructions on the fallback screen:

The old workflow: grab my phone, google for someone describing the exact issue, find the right comment, type the commands into a TTY, see if it works. If it doesn't, either give up and reboot — losing every running agent and open editor — or dive deeper and sink the rest of the afternoon into it.

This time I dropped into TTY3 with Ctrl+Alt+F3, ran claude, and described the problem. It read the relevant logs, found the stuck hyprlock process, relaunched it against the existing Hyprland instance, and verified the session was intact before I switched back.

Ctrl+Alt+F1 later I was back in my session. Same windows, same agents still running, no reboot.

The reason this works isn't the model. It's that Claude Code is a CLI tool — no browser, no GUI, no display server. A TTY and a network connection are enough.