hyprctl prints "Couldn't connect ..." on stdout for stale instance dirs left in /run/user/*/hypr/, so jq's parse error leaked into pacman's pre-transaction hook output. The dead instances were already skipped correctly; only the stderr noise escaped. Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Ls3ump7hcv4oNnjWW5AXmn