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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.

← All of v2.1.251 Home All releases ←olderv2.1.250
Claude Code v2.1.251

Subagents can default to a configured model instead of the session model

Use it now
Useful4 Signal3
Subagents Notable

Subagents without an explicit model now use your configured default subagent model.

What

When a Task worker is launched without an explicit model, it now falls back to a configured default subagent model if one is set, and only then to the model of the session that spawned it. An agent definition's own model setting still wins over both.

Details
  • Precedence: agent-definition setting, then configured default subagent model, then inherited session model.
  • With no default configured, behaviour is unchanged from plain inheritance.
Evidence

otherwise omit it so the worker uses the default (the session model, unless a default subagent model is configured)

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 v2.1.251 →