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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.

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Claude Code v2.1.169

Safe Mode (--safe-mode / CLAUDE_CODE_SAFE_MODE)

What

A new opt-in mode that disables all per-user and per-project customizations for a session. Designed for troubleshooting when Claude Code behaves unexpectedly and you want to isolate whether a plugin, hook, or CLAUDE.md is the cause.

Usage
claude --safe-mode
# or
CLAUDE_CODE_SAFE_MODE=1 claude
Details
  • Disables: CLAUDE.md, skills, plugins, plugin hooks, MCP servers (auto-discovered and claude.ai), custom agents, output styles, workflows, custom themes, and custom keybindings
  • Managed policy settings and hooks (from your organization's policy) still apply
  • The UI surfaces a warning banner so you know safe mode is active
  • Settings dialogs show "disabled in safe mode" labels next to affected options
  • To exit safe mode: remove the flag or unset the env var and restart (claude will tell you which applies)
  • The --agents flag is silently ignored in safe mode (user-supplied agents are disabled)
Evidence

Safe mode toggle (search for "CLAUDE_CODE_SAFE_MODE" and "--safe-mode") — C9() function at line ~3884

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

See this entry in the whole of v2.1.169 →