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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

Policy helpers can declare whether their settings merge or replace

Use it now
Useful2 Signal3
Managed Settings Notable not in their notes

Admins can say whether a per-OS policy helper's settings replace or merge over the source.

outputBehaviorpolicyHelpers
What

A managed-settings policy helper, the per-OS script an administrator points Claude Code at to generate settings, now takes an outputBehavior field that says whether the settings payload it produces replaces that source's settings or merges over them. The field is only read on the per-OS policyHelpers entries; on the singular policyHelper key it is ignored and the helper's output replaces the policy tier regardless. An unrecognised value on a per-OS entry is not tolerated: the whole entry is dropped and no policy helper runs on that operating system.

Details
  • "merge" is the one value checked explicitly at the points where the generated payload is applied; anything else on a valid entry means replace.
  • The field is new in this build and did not exist in 2.1.241, so existing helper configurations keep replacing until they opt into merging.
  • Setting outputBehavior on the singular policyHelper produces a status-only warning during managed-settings loading and validation, saying it is ignored; nothing about the helper's behaviour changes.
  • An unrecognised value is reported as leaving it unknown whether the payload replaces or merges over that source's settings, and the entry is discarded rather than guessed at.
  • Helper fingerprinting now also records the byte size of each inline helper script under its policyHelpers.* key, and the helper store keeps a set of retired helper paths.
Evidence

"outputBehavior" is unrecognized, so whether the payload replaces or merges over this source's settings is unknown., on the singular policyHelper is ignored, "outputBehavior" on the singular policyHelper is ignored

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 →