After the small 2.1.237 the day before, 2.1.238 is another chunky one. No shiny new feature you’d print on a poster — instead a lot of repairs in the places that hurt during real work. Exactly the kind of release you only appreciate once some old annoyance is suddenly gone.
Memory stops filling up
The detail that matters most to me: in long interactive sessions, memory used to grow without bound. The cause was subagent results that stayed in memory even after they had long scrolled out of the visible window. From now on they’re released once they leave the display area. Anyone who keeps Claude Code open for hours knows that creeping slowdown — this should put an end to it.
Alongside that, a bundle of terminal fixes: held Backspace on slow SSH links, stuck bracketed-paste states after Ctrl+Z, clipped lines with emojis or tabs in the permission diffs. Small stuff on its own, noticeable in sum.
Remote Control forgives more
Remote Control has been around a while, but it got fussy under a bad connection. Brief 403 refusals from a proxy or VPN are now tolerated for up to three minutes instead of cutting the connection right away. Sessions whose process crashed can be reused instead of staying dead until a restart. And model switches you make on your phone now show up in the terminal too.
Tighter reins on plugins and MCP
Security is the third thread. Plugin marketplaces can mint short-lived tokens for downloads via a headersHelper — but it only runs on install or update, and you confirm with [y/N]. An MCP headersHelper from a project now needs that folder’s trust dialog accepted and runs without inherited credential variables. Anthropic tightens the screws exactly where third-party code enters the picture.
Handy on the side: bare claude starts faster on the Mac, and the auto-update check no longer elbows its way into startup but runs about ten seconds later.
My take
I almost prefer releases like this to the ones with the big fireworks. A memory leak in long sessions isn’t something you tweet about — but it’s exactly what ruins your day when you actually work with the tool. You don’t notice the fix right away. You just notice that something stopped grating.
The plugin and MCP tightening fits the pattern of recent weeks. The more third-party code comes in through marketplaces and connectors, the more it matters that nothing quietly grabs tokens. Unspectacular, but right.
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