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 v2.1.242 Home All releases olderv2.1.241 v2.1.243newer
Claude Code v2.1.242

Your local branch is moved forward onto the cloud session's commits

Use it now
Useful4 Signal3
Directory Sync Notable not in their notes

Your local branch fast-forwards onto a cloud session's commits unless you turn it off.

CLAUDE_CODE_DIR_SYNC_FFWD
What

When a cloud session's commits sit directly on top of your checkout's current HEAD and your working tree is clean, Claude Code now advances your local branch onto them and tells you your branch has Claude's commits. It waits instead when you have staged changes, an operation in progress, differing files or protected paths, each with a plain explanation. Set CLAUDE_CODE_DIR_SYNC_FFWD to switch this off; it is on otherwise.

Details
  • The move takes the git index lock, merges the index, and updates the branch reference without following symbolic refs. If the index cannot be brought along, the whole move is undone.
  • Named waiting reasons include staged_changes, operation_in_progress, files_differ, not_yet_sent, untracked_dependency_path and protected_path.
  • Files whose names look like credentials, files that are git-ignored, files withheld from sync, and dot-led paths are never taken from the cloud.
  • Reported in telemetry as branch_rule on the git sync open event.
Evidence

claude: undo the fast-forward (the index could not follow)

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 →