You'll noticeTier: how much it should matter to you
2Useful: my rating, 1 to 5
3Signal: worth watching, 1 to 5
SubagentsArea: what it touches
ImprovementsKind: in v2.1.302,
ImprovementsSection of the release
Unclear It is not known whether the short setting is on by default.
What
A subagent is a helper Claude starts to work on part of a task. While it runs, Claude Code writes short progress summaries of what it is doing in the background. Before, each summary was written by copying the subagent's whole transcript, its full record of messages, into a new request.
There is now a "short" mode. It turns the transcript into notes and asks for a summary from those notes instead. It is used only when both are true:
The summary settings ask for "short".
The subagent's model is from the opus or fable family.
In every other case the summary uses the full transcript as before. A summary can also now be skipped when there is nothing to describe, or no text to work from.
Why
Writing summaries from notes makes them cheaper when a subagent's transcript is large.
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 doubtIt is not known whether the short setting is on by default.
