You'll noticeTier: how much it should matter to you
2Useful: my rating, 1 to 5
2Signal: worth watching, 1 to 5
File ToolsArea: what it touches
RemovedKind: in v2.1.288,
RemovedSection of the release
What
The Read tool is what Claude uses to open files. The instructions Claude Code sends to Claude about it no longer include this paragraph on PDFs: that it can read PDF files, that for PDFs over 10 pages it must ask for specific pages (such as "1-5"), that reading a large PDF without doing so will fail, and that the limit is 20 pages per request. This was seen in the instructions for both the command line and the SDK.
Why
Claude's own instructions shape how it behaves, so Claude is no longer told up front how to handle large PDFs. Nothing here shows whether the Read tool's actual handling of PDFs changed.
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 doubtThe prompt ledger records the longest Read description as unchanged in this release, so it is unclear which model's instructions lost the…
