Under the hoodTier: how much it should matter to you
1Useful: my rating, 1 to 5
1Signal: worth watching, 1 to 5
SubagentsArea: what it touches
Internal ChangesKind: in v2.1.271,
Internal ChangesSection of the release
Unclear What the delegationCostsFirst text actually says or when it's shown is not described beyond the setting names.
What
The Task tool (used to hand off work to a subagent, a separate Claude instance handling part of a task) now supports a delegationCostsFirst mode when its description is built. A new helper picks between two related settings depending on whether the client is a "compiled-only" build, choosing either delegationCostsFirstCompiledOnly or delegationCostsFirst.
A prompt capture taken under this release shows the Agent tool's stock description is 7,081 characters (its longest text across model variants), unchanged since the previous release.
Why
This adds a way to have the tool's instructions emphasize the cost of delegating to a subagent before other considerations, though the description text itself has not changed yet in what's been captured.
How sure we are
Something disagreesSomething we can check disagrees with this entry, or the writer said they could not settle it.
The writer flagged doubtWhat the delegationCostsFirst text actually says or when it's shown is not described beyond the setting names.
