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.

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Claude Code v2.1.248

Background command guidance rewritten so the model stops polling

You'll notice
Useful4 Signal3
Background Tasks

Claude is told background command results come back on their own, so it stops polling.

What

New instructions tell the model that a backgrounded command's result comes back on its own, "between your tool calls if you are still working, or by starting a new turn if you have already replied", with variants for when the turn ends and when the session ends. It is told to wait using one blocking foreground command rather than repeated status checks.

Details
  • A new task status shape covers working, completed, failed and cancelled, with a task id, status message, creation time and last update time.
  • Exited commands convert to completed or cancelled status with output truncated behind an [… earlier output omitted; full output: ...] header.
Evidence

between your tool calls if you are still working, or by starting a new turn if you have already replied

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 v2.1.248 →