Source Intelligence

DisclaimerUnofficial, and not affiliated with Anthropic. Nearly all of this is read straight out of what ships: npm bundles, captured prompts, published docs. Anthropic's own notes go in verbatim, marked as theirs. The rest is my reading, and every entry carries the strings behind it. If one looks wrong, vote it down and say why.

All of v2.1.86 Home All releases olderv2.1.85 v2.1.87newer
Claude Code v2.1.86

File Read Caching ("Unchanged since last read")

What

When the Read tool is used on a file that hasn't changed since a previous read in the same conversation, Claude now returns a short notice instead of re-reading the entire file, saving context window space.

Details
  • Displays "Unchanged since last read" in the tool output
  • The full message tells Claude to refer to the earlier Read tool result instead of re-reading
  • Controlled by the tengu_compact_line_prefix_killswitch feature flag (enabled when killswitch is off)
  • Helps conserve context window tokens in long conversations with repeated file reads
Evidence

Read caching message (search for "File unchanged since last read") — kf1() at line ~163425

Strings lifted out of the shipped bundle, so the claim above can be checked against them.

See this entry in the whole of v2.1.86 →