What
CLAUDE_CODE_MAX_RETRIES no longer re-validates a value it already parsed. The clamping behaviour and its warning are unchanged.
Evidence
clamped to
Strings lifted out of the shipped bundle, so the claim above can be checked against them.
Names in the bundleCLAUDE_CODE_MAX_RETRIES
The entry above is what we published on the day. These lines were added later, as Anthropic's own pages caught up, and they sit beside the original rather than replacing it.
Added since
A small documentation edit on Environment variables touched a line naming CLAUDE_CODE_MAX_RETRIES after this was published.
| `CLAUDE_CODE_RETRY_WATCHDOG` | Set to `1` for unattended sessions such as eval harnesses, CI jobs, or remote workers. Retries `429` and `529` capacity errors indefinitely instead of failing after `CLAUDE_CODE_MAX_RETRIES` attempts. Claud…env-vars see the edit
Confirmed since
Anthropic's documentation has since written up CLAUDE_CODE_MAX_RETRIES, on Monitoring.
The `attempt` attribute on the event records the total number of attempts. `CLAUDE_CODE_MAX_RETRIES` defaults to 10 and is capped at 15. On v2.1.199 or later, you can set `CLAUDE_CODE_RETRY_WATCHDOG` to raise the default and remove the cap.monitoring-usage see the edit
One source agreesOne thing we can check says the same as this entry.
Anthropic's documentation agrees
Anthropic's documentation has since written up CLAUDE_CODE_MAX_RETRIES, on Monitoring.