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 v2.1.247 Home All releases olderv2.1.246 v2.1.248newer
Claude Code v2.1.247

Background task reports carry type, owner and an ambient flag

You'll notice
Useful3 Signal3
Background Tasks

Task reports now say what kind of task it is, who owns it, and whether it's housekeeping.

What

Every background task reported through stream-JSON and SDK output now describes itself more fully: what kind of task it is, which agent owns it, what shell a local bash task runs under, and whether it is an ambient housekeeping task rather than something the user started. Ambient tasks can be kept out of the transcript while still showing up in task lists, and a change to that flag now counts as a change in its own right, so listings refresh when it flips rather than only when tasks join or leave the set.

Details
  • The report gained the fields task_type, owner_agent_id, shell_kind, ambient and observer_owned.
  • owner_agent_id identifies the owning agent for bash, MCP and websocket monitor tasks.
  • The SDK schema gained an optional boolean ambient on the task started, task updated and task list frames.
  • Because ambient is optional, tasks that do not set it behave exactly as before.
  • Consumers that rebuild their whole task set from each payload will now see emissions where nothing was added or removed, only an existing task's ambient flag changed.
Evidence

or an entry's \ambient\ flag flips, owner_agent_id

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 v2.1.247 →