Claude Code adds a Focus view to hide tool noise

Claude Code's v2.1.221 release adds a Focus view for VSCode. A chat-menu toggle, Ctrl+Alt+F, collapses tool activity behind an expandable per-turn summary with a live running-tool indicator, per the release notes. Long agent sessions pile up tool calls fast, and finding what the model actually said means scrolling past them.

The quieter addition is prompt-audit, a new subcommand in the claude-api skill. It scans prompts and tool descriptions for patterns written for older models. Most teams are carrying scaffolding tuned for models two generations back.

That's the tool that flags prompts nobody's rewritten since the model changed.

Two smaller changes ship alongside these. /fork now creates its own git worktree instead of sharing the original checkout, so a forked session can't collide with the parent's working directory.

Background sessions now commit and push automatically to preserve work. They also report back where that work landed, which matters when a long background task would otherwise vanish with the terminal.

Config asymmetry worth copying

Remote Control auto-start can no longer be enabled by repo-local settings. It can only be disabled. A cloned repo can shrink what your agent is allowed to do, but never expand it.

That's the right default for any tool where a checked-out repo can influence agent permissions. Worth checking whether your own tooling has it backwards.