v2.1.200

Source: Anthropic Claude Code Date: 2026-07-03 URL: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/releases/tag/v2.1.200

Summary

Two-part release. (1) Defaults move toward the human gate: AskUserQuestion dialogs no longer auto-continue by default (opt into an idle timeout via /config), and the permission mode formerly called “default” is renamed “Manual” across the CLI, --help, VS Code, and JetBrains (--permission-mode manual / "defaultMode": "manual" now accepted). (2) Background-agent liveness/identity hardening — the bulk of the changelog: sessions silently stopping after sleep/wake; re-running an Esc-cancelled turn after a stall respawn; agents never restarting after a crash left a stale daemon.lock with an OS-reused PID; daemon handover now judged by the version’s embedded build timestamp so a reinstalled older build can’t seize the daemon; roster fixes (transient corruption permanently disabling orphan cleanup, older binaries dropping fields written by newer ones, socket auth tokens stripped on restart); and subagents cut off by a rate limit before any output now fail cleanly instead of returning an empty result. Plus accessibility (screen-reader labels, decorative-glyph hiding), a tmux 3.4+ synchronized-output flicker fix, and worktree/plugin-scoping fixes.

Implications

Feeds agent-layer convergence and governance-as-frontier (at the harness layer). This is the settling move after a week of removing asks (v2.1.198 auto-commit/push/PR; Claude Tag ambient mode): the machine-to-machine autonomy keeps expanding, but the defaults facing the human are made more explicit — the question dialog now waits instead of auto-picking, and the euphemistic “default” mode is renamed to the honest word, Manual. Naming honesty as a UX act, the same register as v2.1.199’s truth-honesty fixes.

• The liveness pile extends v2.1.199’s principle from result to existence: you can’t trust a background agent’s self-report of its own state (is it alive? did it already run? which daemon is real?). The daemon-handover-by-build-timestamp fix is verify-identity-by-artifact — don’t trust which process claims to be the daemon, check the build stamp. Same epistemics as 200 ≠ success.
• The rate-limit “fail cleanly instead of empty result” fix is a direct continuation of v2.1.199’s empty-vs-error work — the harness is still closing every seam where a killed child looks like a finished one.
• Reliability work continues to lag the autonomy push, not lead it: the asks were removed first (198), the trust holes patched after (199, 200).