Version 2.1.302 landed on npm on October 16 at 16:48 UTC, a day after 2.1.301. This time the changelog carries an announcement that reaches past the tool itself.
A date for Claude Design
/design-sync and /design-login now show a notice: standalone Claude Design at claude.ai/design closes on December 14, 2026. Design itself is not going away—it lives on inside conversations, as Anthropic said in early October. If the standalone surface sits in one of your workflows, you have just under two months.
Two related fixes come with it. /design consent and /design revoke used to suggest /design-login when they failed in a cloud session, where it does not exist. They now point to claude.ai/design/settings.
Subagents behave the same everywhere
Fork subagents (subagent_type: "fork") are now on by default in claude -p, the Agent SDK, the desktop app and VS Code. The terminal already had them. CLAUDE_CODE_FORK_SUBAGENT=0 turns them off, and claude mcp serve never offers them.
Behaviour lines up elsewhere too. The desktop app and VS Code now always run the main conversation’s subagents in the background, the way the terminal does, while a subagent’s own Agent calls run in the foreground. And prompt and agent hooks for the same event run at most twelve at a time, with the rest queued.
There is also CLAUDE_CODE_AUTO_MODE_MODEL, which picks the model the client-side auto mode classifier uses. It changes nothing for server-side auto mode, which got a different improvement: a conversation too long for the safety check is now compacted instead of having every checked tool call denied.
Two fixes worth knowing about
The Read tool used to load any image file into memory whole, whatever its size, and it did the same for a pipe or device named like an image. Sources above 128 MB are now refused.
The second one is about money. Prompt suggestions were spending usage credits on models your plan only pays for with credits. They are now skipped after a reply billed to credits.
The rest is the usual list. On Windows, every file write was refused or queried for projects on exFAT and FAT32 drives. Startup with many plugins got faster, most of all on Windows. And /autocompact and /effort saved to the wrong model when a gateway names Opus 4 or 4.1 with a prefix.
Idle compaction from 2.1.299 now has its own row in /config, and the notices after a compaction say how to turn it off. That is a good sign: a feature gets its switch once people have lived with it.
The date is the actual news
Release notes are made of small parts, and this time the story hides in a subordinate clause. December 14 is a hard deadline for a product that has been around for months. If you use Design through the standalone surface in scripts or handoffs, rework it now rather than in early December.