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 v2.1.246 Home All releases olderv2.1.245 v2.1.247newer
Claude Code v2.1.246

Subagent results say when a turn limit cut the work short

You'll notice
Useful4 Signal3
Subagents

A subagent that runs out of turns is now marked incomplete, with a nudge to message it to continue.

What

A subagent that stops because it ran out of turns no longer looks like one that finished. Its returned result is prefixed with a note marking the text as incomplete, the completion notice names the turn count it hit, and where the agent type supports it you are told to send that worker a message to continue rather than treating the output as final.

Details
  • The prefix reads "The text below is PARTIAL output; treat it as incomplete." and is assembled from that fixed text plus the turn limit that was actually reached, inserted at runtime.
  • Nothing gates this: no flag or setting is involved, and the note is emitted whenever a turn limit was hit.
  • The result contract the model sees gained a fourth outcome covering the partial, out-of-turns case, with a pointer to resume that worker by its task id; the existing "completed" outcome was reworded to "finished".
  • The step that assembles a finished subagent result now supports a list of leading harness notes instead of at most one, and the async agent's completion status carries a flag recording that the limit was reached.
Evidence

stopped at its ${a}-turn limit (partial result; , The text below is PARTIAL output; treat it as incomplete., stopped at its N-turn limit

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 v2.1.246 →