You'll noticeTier: how much it should matter to you
1Useful: my rating, 1 to 5
1Signal: worth watching, 1 to 5
DebuggingArea: what it touches
ImprovementsKind: in v2.1.280,
ImprovementsSection of the release
What
A dim hint shown alongside some failure and log messages was reworded. It used to give a terse instruction; it now reads more explicitly, telling you to restart with --debug-file <path> to write a debug log explaining why something happened. A related fixed suffix string was also added, appearing to point users toward the debug log for more detail when a warning or error message is shown.
Why
The clearer wording makes it more obvious that restarting with --debug-file produces a log explaining the cause of a problem, rather than just a generic debug dump, which should make it easier to know when and why to reach for it.
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.
Confirmed sinceAnthropic's documentation has since written up --debug-file, on Monitoring.If nothing arrives, start Claude Code with `claude --debug-file <path>` and check the log it writes to that path. Claude Code reports failures from the exporters you configure as `[3P telemetry]` errors, where 3P means third-party. Lines p…monitoring-usagesee the edit
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 doubtIt's not fully clear which specific warning or error message the new fixed suffix string is appended to.
Anthropic's documentation agreesAnthropic's documentation has since written up --debug-file, on Monitoring.
Anthropic's release notes agreeImproved the cross-session messaging startup warning to explain that --debug-file writes a debug log to a path you choose
