October 9, 2026
Claude Code subagents get their own auto-compaction threshold: version 2.1.296 adds a parameter
On October 9, Claude Code 2.1.296 shipped: a subagent can compact its context earlier than the main conversation. The autoCompactWindow parameter is set in the subagent's frontmatter and in --agents definitions. The CLAUDE_CODE_WORKFLOW_SUBAGENT_MODEL variable moves all workflow agents to one model; other subagents keep their own.
Subagents used to have no separate auto-compaction threshold. Now every agent has this setting.
Model for workflows. One environment variable sets one model for all workflow agents, leaving other subagents untouched.
PowerShell commands longer than about 1 KB used to always prompt for permission, and allow rules did not apply to them. Now rules and read-only checks apply up to 32 KB.
File edits. Edit and NotebookEdit used to replace all non-ASCII characters in files that were not UTF-8 (Windows-1252, Shift-JIS, GBK). Now such edits are refused.
/cost, the status line and --max-budget-usd now count Sonnet 5.5 cache reads at $0.10 per million tokens instead of $0.20.
The release has more fixes than new features, and many of them concern hooks and plugins.