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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 v2.1.242

open_app can launch without stealing focus, and teach mode can be declined for good

Use it now
Useful3 Signal3
Computer Use not in their notes

Apps can now be launched in the background without stealing focus, returning a window id.

open_app
What

Launching an app during computer use now has two modes: a background launch that does not bring the app to the front and leaves it reachable through the per-app tools, and the normal launch that brings it forward. The launch returns a window id when one is available.

Details
  • The request to record a teach-mode demonstration now has an explicit declined result, which tells the model not to ask again in this session.
  • A separate refusal, cu_lock_held, is returned when another Claude session took the computer while the approval prompt was still open.
  • Screenshot coordinate conversion now reports which coordinate frame a point is in whenever that frame differs from the scaled image.
  • Background launching needs a host that supplies app-scoped control and an app lock already held; otherwise the front-of-screen behaviour applies.
Evidence

In background app mode, the launch does NOT bring it to the front

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 v2.1.242 →