Claude Code reads environment data from 256 user processes to handle a 20-line task

A benchmark test on a small Node.js project found that Claude Code accessed environment files for 256 user-owned processes before writing a single line of code, compared to Codex CLI's far narrower footprint of 303 total file reads versus 2,779. The agent systematically walked the /proc filesystem to inherit the parent shell's environment variables, a documented Linux mechanism, but in doing so it read process environments beyond just the parent shell. Among the processes successfully accessed were Firefox tabs, VS Code, Zoom, Slack, and gnome-keyring-daemon, the system credential store managing SSH keys and stored secrets. Reading a process's /proc environ file does not directly extract stored secrets, but it does expose addressing information that could be used to query the keyring programmatically. The benchmark project and raw strace data have been published on GitHub for independent verification.