What
Artifact preview renders a page locally and returns screenshots of it. It is now offered only when Claude Code finds a browser to render with:
- At startup Claude Code searches in the background for Chrome, Chromium or Edge, including Playwright installs and the locations in
BUN_CHROME_PATHandPLAYWRIGHT_BROWSERS_PATH. - If the search finds no browser, preview stays off.
- Setting
CLAUDE_CODE_ARTIFACT_PREVIEW=trueexplicitly skips this requirement. - The search result is reported as
tengu_artifact_preview_browser, and failures are logged, for example "Artifact preview: the startup browser search failed:".
The underlying switch is unchanged: CLAUDE_CODE_ARTIFACT_PREVIEW, or the server flag tengu_cobalt_plinth_aspen when the variable is not set, which falls back to off. Nothing has been read about that flag.
Why
If you have preview turned on but no browser installed, Claude is no longer offered a preview action that could not work.
tengu_cobalt_plinth_aspen Not enough to sayNothing here resolved what this flag was doing on this version, so nothing here should be read as on or off.
This account: no value returned · anonymous baseline: no value returned · compiled default in v2.1.283: off
These values were read against a different version of Claude Code, so treat them as the nearest reading available instead of one taken on this release.
Read once, for one account on one subscription tier, against v2.1.283. It isn't a statement about your account. What a flag value here can and cannot tell you