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 v2.1.196 Home All releases olderv2.1.195 v2.1.197newer
Claude Code v2.1.196

padded-countdown Token Reminder Mode

Feature flag
tengu_lapis_anchor_budget 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 v2.1.196: not a boolean we can read

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 v2.1.196. It isn't a statement about your account. What a flag value here can and cannot tell you

A new padded-countdown value for the totalTokensReminder setting counts down from a configurable token budget, tracking cumulative context spend monotonically across compactions and /clear operations.

Details
  • Budget is set via totalTokensReminderBudget in settings or the CLAUDE_CODE_TOTAL_TOKENS_REMINDER_BUDGET environment variable; defaults to 15,000,000 tokens (server-overridable via tengu_lapis_anchor_budget).
  • Unlike countdown (which reflects live remaining context window), padded-countdown accumulates spend across the full session lifetime including compacted-away context.
  • Useful for multi-agent sessions where individual context windows are small but total spend matters.
Evidence

New mode (search for "padded-countdown" and "@internal Starting budget (tokens) for totalTokensReminder 'padded-countdown' mode")

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 v2.1.196 →