You'll noticeTier: how much it should matter to you
3Useful: my rating, 1 to 5
1Signal: worth watching, 1 to 5
ModelsArea: what it touches
Bug FixesKind: in v2.1.281,
Bug FixesSection of the release
What
Claude's replies arrive as a stream, a piece at a time. If that stream closes normally but before the reply is complete, Claude Code now treats it as a dropped connection. This covers a stream that ends in the middle of a content block, or ends without a final stop signal. You see "Connection closed before the response finished", and the error is on the list of network errors that are retried.
A second new error covers a malformed stream, where an update points at a content block that does not exist or has already closed. Stream-failure telemetry gains the reasons stream_truncated and malformed_stream.
Why
A cut-off reply is no longer mistaken for a finished one, so you get a clear error and an automatic retry instead of a silently incomplete answer.