A freshly installed Ubuntu-24.04 distro prompts interactively for a new UNIX user on its first invocation; with piped stdio that prompt blocks forever and the sidecar never starts. Adding --user root to wslArgs sidesteps the whole first-run flow for every wsl.exe we spawn (sidecar, resolveWslOpencode, probes). opencode inside WSL only needs an HTTP listener so running as root is fine.