Claude Code 2.1.316 landed on npm at 00:42 UTC on October 31, two versions after 2.1.314 yesterday. Two new environment variables are the reason to look at it.
Two switches for the thinking budget
CLAUDE_CODE_SUBAGENT_EFFORT sets the effort level subagents run at when nothing else names one. Until now they inherited the session’s. For the most common case — an expensive main session dispatching a dozen searches in parallel — that was the wrong direction of inheritance: subagents read files and report locations, the main session draws the conclusions. Now the budget can be lowered where it is not needed.
CLAUDE_CODE_DISABLE_ULTRATHINK turns off the ultrathink keyword. That is mostly interesting for managed installs, where somebody owns the cost per session and would rather a single word in a prompt did not blow the thinking budget upward.
Pooled budgets reach the gateway
The Claude apps gateway gains pooled group budgets: one monthly budget shared by a group’s members, on top of each member’s own limit, set with pooled_budget on the spend limits admin API. It is the same mechanism announced for Claude Enterprise two days ago — now arriving where developer access actually gets administered.
managed.policy_mode: layered fits alongside it: instead of only the first matching policy, every policy that matches a developer applies, each merged over the ones below it. Anyone who had to sort policies into an order to avoid overlaps can now stack them instead.
The fix list is long, and it says something
Among the fixes: shell commands left running on macOS and Linux when Claude Code exits by itself; --restricted sessions uploading files from outside the working directories when a Read allow rule covered them; and subagents that inherited a parent subagent’s model switching to the main model when they woke up. The deprecation of fast mode for Opus 4.8 ships in this release too.
What stands out is how many entries hang off permissions, gateways and managed settings. The bugs Claude Code is producing right now do not come from writing code. They come from the seam between the tool and the organization running it. That is the profile of a product that has arrived in the enterprise.