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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

Workflow-authoring skill autoloads and gates the Workflow tool

You'll notice
Useful4 Signal4
Workflows

A bundled workflow-authoring skill loads itself when you mention workflows, and multi-agent runs need your ask.

What

Claude Code now ships a bundled workflow-authoring skill that is registered at startup alongside cowork-setup, loop, schedule-remote-agents, claude-api and claude-code, and pulls itself into a turn when you mention a workflow keyword or enter ultracode with a full reminder. Script-writing guidance now tells the model to load it before writing a script, and the Workflow tool's own instructions open with a hard rule that multi-agent orchestration only runs when you asked for it. Together this means workflows are written with real guidance in context, and are not started behind your back.

Details
  • The Workflow tool may only be called after an explicit opt-in: the keyword "ultracode", session-level Ultracode, an explicit request in your own words, a skill or slash command that says to, or a named saved workflow; otherwise the model is told to use the Agent tool, or to estimate the cost and ask you first.
  • The tool description embeds a canonical pipeline()/parallel() example and requires a plain literal export const meta = {...}.
  • The skill is unavailable when the entrypoint is local-agent, when skillOverrides sets workflow-authoring to off or user-invocable-only, or when a configured skill allow-list excludes it; the Workflow tool then falls back to a shorter description.
  • Availability is computed once and cached for the session, so changing the override mid-session has no effect until you restart.
  • Each autoload fires the tengu_workflow_authoring_skill_autoload event with trigger set to keyword or ultracode.
  • Unlike the API and Code skills, which have CLAUDE_CODE_DISABLE_CLAUDE_API_SKILL and CLAUDE_CODE_DISABLE_CLAUDE_CODE_SKILL, there is no environment variable to disable this one; the skill override is the only switch.
Evidence

workflow-authoring, registerWorkflowAuthoringSkill, tengu_workflow_authoring_skill_autoload, ONLY call this tool when the user has explicitly opted into multi-agent orchestration.

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 →