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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 v2.1.97 Home All releases ←olderv2.1.96 v2.1.98newer→
Claude Code v2.1.97

Buddy/Companion Feature Removed

The entire Buddy/Companion system has been removed from Claude Code. This includes:

  • The /buddy command and companion creature generation
  • ASCII art companion display with species, hats, eyes, and rarity tiers
  • The companion reaction system that watched conversations and commented in speech bubbles
  • The companion mute/unmute toggle in the footer
  • The companion_intro dynamic section in system prompts
  • The buddy teaser notification ("Hatch a coding buddy") that prompted users to try /buddy
  • The LLM-powered companion personality generation using Claude API
  • The "Voice mode is now available" static footer notice (replaced by a tip — see below)
Evidence

Removed functions include hn8 (buddy_react API), eE_ (creature generation), w34 (companion_intro), tcK (conversation watcher) — search for "buddy_react" in v2.1.96 only

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

See this entry in the whole of v2.1.97 →