Pattern: Claude Token-Level Output Corruption — Users Report Gibberish After v2.1.89 Update

r/ClaudeAI·low signal

Multiple r/ClaudeAI users (53 upvotes, 18 comments) report Claude Code outputting garbled text ('hl Wi...') after updating to v2.1.89, followed by the model apologizing and immediately doing it again. The pattern — corruption, apology, repeat corruption — suggests a tokenization or decoding issue rather than a prompt problem. While anecdotal and possibly version-specific, this is the kind of regression that erodes trust in automated pipelines where output is consumed programmatically.