Under the hoodTier: how much it should matter to you
1Useful: my rating, 1 to 5
1Signal: worth watching, 1 to 5
ElsewhereArea: what it touches
Internal ChangesKind: in v2.1.280,
Internal ChangesSection of the release
What
Claude Code keeps an internal record of what changed between requests (things like the model, the system prompt, and the reasoning effort) to decide whether it can reuse the cached prompt or needs to send a fresh one, and to help with diagnostics. This record now also tracks two more fields:
thinkingModeChanged, whether extended thinking mode was turned on or off
thinkingDisplayChanged, whether the display of that thinking changed
Both fields record the previous and new values, matching how the existing fields already work.
Why
Switching thinking mode on or off, or changing how thinking is displayed, can affect what should be cached. Tracking these changes explicitly lets Claude Code handle the prompt cache correctly around those switches instead of missing them.