At startup Claude Code may wait for feature flags, remote switches that turn parts of it on or off. The decision to wait changed: it now comes from shared checks that consider the time available, whether settings are still pending, whether a saved copy is empty, and whether an early fetch was started. The old decision and the recheck for switched-off features remain, and the wait is now recorded in Claude Code's usage data.
The main visible difference is in what gets recorded about the startup wait.
tengu_auto_mode_config 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 v2.1.285: not a boolean we can read
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 v2.1.285. It isn't a statement about your account. What a flag value here can and cannot tell you
It is unclear whether how long startup waits has itself changed.