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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 v2.1.234

Status-line narration under the spinner

Not switched on
Useful3 Signal4
Terminal UI Notable not in their notes

A background query could narrate what Claude is doing under the spinner, off unless enabled.

Status-line narration below the spinner is built and paced by a configured interval, off unless explicitly enabled.

Feature flag
tengu_pewter_kite_ms 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 v2.1.234: not a boolean we can read

Read once, for one account on one subscription tier, against v2.1.234. It isn't a statement about your account. What a flag value here can and cannot tell you

CLAUDE_CODE_ENABLE_NARRATION
What

While the main loop is busy, Claude Code can run a background one-turn query with no tools available that produces a short status line saying what Claude is doing now and what it plans to do next, then draws it as a block below the spinner instead of the old single-suffix line. It is paced by a configured interval and is off unless explicitly enabled, so nothing changes for most users in this build.

Details
  • Enabled by the CLAUDE_CODE_ENABLE_NARRATION environment variable; pacing comes from the tengu_pewter_kite_ms interval, which defaults to 0 and so leaves narration off on its own.
  • The model output is parsed into a now: line and a next: line, and a next: value of "none", "n/a" or "not stated" is dropped rather than displayed.
  • The spinner no longer appends a single "Next: …" or "Tip: …" suffix when narration is active, and instead renders a block with bold now: and next: labels plus a separate tip: line.
  • Narration is registered as a query source alongside "prompt_suggestion", "away_summary" and "agent_summary", meaning it never triggers auto-compact and never shows the user a prompt-too-long error.
  • Each generation emits narration_generate telemetry.
Evidence

Status line for the user, who is glancing at the screen., "narration"

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 v2.1.234 →