Source Intelligence

DisclaimerUnofficial, and not affiliated with Anthropic. Nearly all of this is read straight out of what ships: npm bundles, captured prompts, published docs. Anthropic's own notes go in verbatim, marked as theirs. The rest is my reading, and every entry carries the strings behind it. If one looks wrong, vote it down and say why.

All of v2.1.122 Home All releases olderv2.1.121 v2.1.123newer
Claude Code v2.1.122

"Investigate First" System Prompt [Gradual Rollout]

Feature flag
tengu_slate_harrier Not enough to say

Nothing here resolved what this flag was doing on this version, so nothing here should be read as on or off.

This account: no value returned · anonymous baseline: no value returned · compiled default in v2.1.122: no gate table built for this version

These values were read against a different version of Claude Code, so treat them as the nearest reading available instead of one taken on this release.

Read once, for one account on one subscription tier, against v2.1.122. It isn't a statement about your account. What a flag value here can and cannot tell you

What

A new system prompt injection that instructs Claude to investigate before asking clarifying questions, gated behind the tengu_slate_harrier feature flag and configurable via CLAUDE_CODE_INVESTIGATE_FIRST environment variable.

Status

Feature-flagged via tengu_slate_harrier (defaults to "off"). Only applies when using claude-opus-4-7.

Details
  • Two modes: "additive" (adds investigation guidance to the existing "executing actions with care" prompt) and "compact" (uses a shorter version of the actions prompt plus investigation guidance)
  • In both modes, adds: "Asking the user a clarifying question has a cost: it interrupts them... Before asking, spend up to a minute on read-only investigation (grep the codebase, check docs, search memory) so your question is specific."
  • Can be overridden via CLAUDE_CODE_INVESTIGATE_FIRST=additive|compact|off
Evidence

Feature flag check (search for "tengu_slate_harrier") and env var (search for "CLAUDE_CODE_INVESTIGATE_FIRST")

Strings lifted out of the shipped bundle, so the claim above can be checked against them.

Related

Other releases about the same thing. Found by shared names or similar wording; neither means one caused the other.

See this entry in the whole of v2.1.122 →