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 v2.1.238 Home All releases olderv2.1.237 v2.1.239newer
Claude Code v2.1.238

Self-hosted runner: prefetched-checkout fast path is compiled in but inert

Not switched on
Useful1 Signal3
Self-Hosted Runner

The self-hosted runner has code to reuse a pre-fetched repo copy, but every clone still fetches fully.

A prefetch state reader, a pinned upstream ref and a freshness check are compiled in and never called.

What

The runner gained machinery to reuse an already-fetched copy of a repository instead of cloning it: a reader for a prefetch state file, a pinned upstream ref refs/remotes/prefetch/staging, and a function to judge whether the prefetch is fresh enough to trust. None of it runs. Every clone still does a full fetch.

Details
  • The reader is called on the clone path but its body returns immediately, so the prefetched tip is never populated.
  • The eligibility function, the only thing that would weigh freshness, repo identity, worktree mode and worker epoch, has no caller anywhere in the build.
  • The git prepare function accepts the new prefetched-tip argument and never reads it; its fetch is wrapped in a build-time-true condition, so the skip-the-fetch branch is compiled out. A sibling telemetry helper returns an empty object.
  • Were it switched on, it would require the environment variable CLAUDE_RUNNER_TRUST_CANONICAL_PREWARM set with --drain-grace-sec 0, single-worker mode, and the hardcoded repository anthropics/anthropic, making it an Anthropic-internal path rather than a general one.
Evidence

canonical is not a trusted one-shot prewarm (CLAUDE_RUNNER_TRUST_CANONICAL_PREWARM unset or drain-grace > 0), refs/remotes/prefetch/staging

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 v2.1.238 →