Claude Code Restores Nested Subagents at Depth 3

Claude Code restored nested subagent spawning at depth 3 on July 24, three days after disabling it entirely, per the changelog. It's back on by default for anyone running Claude Code, and it restores an orchestration capability that had been pulled just days earlier.

Depth 3 means a coordinator agent can spawn worker agents that spawn their own verifiers. That shape was impossible under the depth-1 default enforced the week before. It's the difference between one agent doing a task and a small team checking each other's work.

v2.1.217 shipped July 21 and disabled nested subagent spawning by default after unbounded fan-out problems, per the changelog. v2.1.219 shipped July 24 and reversed it, setting the default spawn depth back to 3.

The same environment variable, CLAUDE_CODE_MAX_SUBAGENT_SPAWN_DEPTH, now works in reverse: it's the manual switch to force depth back down to 1. If you set it last week to route around the July 21 restriction, it's still set. It's now suppressing a capability you probably want back.

The changelog doesn't say whether the reversal applies retroactively to users who never touched the setting, only that the default changed.

Two contradictory defaults in three days show Claude Code's team is still tuning fan-out limits by feel. There's no settled model yet for safe spawn depth. Watch whether the next release holds depth 3 or reverses again. Also watch whether anyone who set the env var workaround before July 24 still has it silently overriding a default they'd want back.