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 v2.1.239 Home All releases olderv2.1.238 v2.1.240newer
Claude Code v2.1.239

Lower-priority continuation after a session limit, built but dark

Not switched on
Useful3 Signal5
Usage & Limits Notable not in their notes

Hitting the 5-hour limit could offer to keep working at reduced priority, but it is off for everyone.

A whole lower-priority subsystem with a hidden /low-priority command needs a server arm and config with enabled true.

/low-priority
What

When you hit the 5-hour usage limit, Claude Code can offer to keep working at reduced priority against your weekly allowance instead of making you wait, with a hidden /low-priority command, an entry on the usage-limit dialog, a waiting state, and its own retry and stop-reason accounting. Nothing appears unless the server both puts your account in the treatment arm through a response header and ships a config object named tengu_toasty_breeze with enabled set to true. That config defaults to empty, so enabled is false and the whole subsystem is off for everyone in this build.

Details
  • The offer header is anthropic-ratelimit-unified-slow-offer and reads either treatment or control; companion headers -retry-after, -max-wait, -budget-utilization and -status carry the retry delay, the ceiling on waiting, how much of the budget is spent, and the current state.
  • There is no local flag for the header side of it, so the server alone decides whether the offer exists; the hidden /low-priority command is gated separately on the client-enabled flag from the config object.
  • The command is registered hidden, so it never shows in the command list, and its description reads "Continue now at lower priority after reaching your session limit; run again to stop".
  • Choosing the menu entry records a selection event, and when the server has not made the offer the menu answers "Lower-priority mode isn't available right now."
  • Four pieces of copy come from the same config and can be replaced by the server: the menu label, a notice line, a status line, and the banner shown while waiting.
  • A low_priority_waiting message kind carries the waiting state alongside those status and wait banners.
  • 429 responses that report a busy slot are retried with jitter, and the mode records why it stopped: weekly allowance exhausted, budget, maximum wait exceeded, wall clock and others.
  • Six telemetry events cover the flow: offer capable, offer shown, accepted, request, wait, ended; API-error telemetry gained a marker for requests made on the low-priority path.
  • None of these strings or the tengu_toasty_breeze key exist in v2.1.238.
Evidence

Continue now at lower priority, You've used this week's lower-priority allowance, /${wlr} to continue now at lower priority (counts toward your weekly limit), Lower-priority mode isn't available right now.

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 v2.1.239 →