Claude Code v2.1.261
2 hours ago
Claude Code v2.1.261 shipped on September fourth. It adds a command that audits your loaded skills, two settings that let more command output through, and a flag for long subagent prompts. The rest is repair work, and the prompt you type into got most of it.
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Claude Code v2.1.261
Claude Code v2.1.261 shipped on September fourth. It adds a command that audits your loaded skills, two settings that let more command output through, and a flag for long subagent prompts. The rest is repair work, and the prompt you type into got most of it.
01 — What's new
The additions.
/skill-doctor
Every skill you load sits in the context window whether Claude reaches for it or not. The new /skill-doctor command reports on that. It names the loaded skills that went unused and what each one costs you in context, so you can prune them. Run it in a session that has been going a while.
Output settings and the subagent prompt file
When a command prints more than Claude can take inline, the output goes to a file instead. Two new settings raise that ceiling: bashOutputMaxChars for shell commands, taskOutputMaxChars for background tasks. Either one goes up to 128K characters. And a subagent system prompt too long for the command line can now come from a file.
02 — The prompt input
The prompt you type into.
Character order and word keys
If you type fast, or hold a key down and let it repeat, characters were landing in the prompt out of order, and some were dropped. That is fixed in the input layer, so it holds wherever you type. The word editing keys now match Bash. Ctrl+W deletes back to whitespace, and punctuation separates words. keybindingFlavor no longer has any effect.
03 — Stops, resumes, Remote Control
Stopping, resuming, and Remote Control.
Stop and Remote Control state
A Stop sent just after the first prompt was ignored in SDK and cloud sessions, and the run finished anyway. It stops now. Remote Control showed a stale permission mode when a phone or browser attached, and left the spinner running after a turn ended. And a SendMessage to an offline machine read back as delivered. It now says delivery is queued until that machine reconnects.
Resuming changed the request
Resuming a session was losing hook output and other context around parallel tool calls, so the conversation you came back to was not the one you left. And resuming from a transcript file would adopt a malformed session ID recorded inside it. It now resumes under a fresh one.
04 — Guardrails
What now stops and asks you first.
The delete prompt and packed diagram links
The safety prompt for a dangerous delete now catches two more shapes: a recursive force delete on positional parameters, and the same command inside a double quoted shell script. Those are the shapes a wrapper script hides a delete in. Auto mode also treats a link that packs your content into a public diagram renderer as an upload to that site, so it is not approved for you.
05 — The VS Code extension
The VS Code extension.
The VS Code extension
In the VS Code extension, the MCP servers dialog got an Add server form and a Remove action, so a server goes in without leaving the editor. A session already open in a terminal or another window now carries a hollow ring instead of looking closed. And the model picker is one flat list, with the models your organization disabled dropped from it.
Read the full entry
The full entry sits at the top of CHANGELOG.md in the repository, and on the release page for this tag. Claude Code v2.1.261.