So, I'm- I'm out in the shed last week, right?
Hands covered in grease from restoring this old postie bike,
and I leave Claude Code running a background refactoring job.
I wash up, walk back inside, and- and boom.
Fifty dollars.
Just gone.
Vaporized.
Wait, fifty dollars?
On a background refactor?
How- how is that even possible for a local tool?
It spawned subagents, mate.
But- but then those subagents spawned their own subagents, and it just became this
nested, infinite loop of digital workers hiring more workers.
A complete runaway swarm.
Thankfully, Anthropic just dropped v2.1.217 on July 21st, 2026,
and it's basically a direct response to this whole infinite fan-out nightmare,
brought to us by Jellypod AI.
Yeah, they completely clamped down on it.
The default nesting limit used to be five levels deep.
Five!
Now?
It's zero.
Absolute zero.
By default, a subagent is strictly forbidden from spawning its own nested subagents.
It- it just blocks it outright.
Zero is a pretty heavy hammer, but I reckon it'll save a lot of wallets.
What if you actually need that depth, though?
Like, if you're working on a massive legacy system and you need the agents to
delegate?
You have to explicitly override it now using the environment variable
CLAUDE_CODE_MAX_SUBAGENT_SPAWN_DEPTH.
But if you do that, you've got to watch your concurrency.
There's a second variable now, CLAUDE_CODE_MAX_CONCURRENT_SUBAGENTS,
which limits how many can run in parallel.
That one defaults to twenty, which is still a lot of horsepower.
Right, because the budget check was only happening at the coordinator level,
not the active workers.
But in v2.1.217, they fixed that.
If you run, say, claude -p "Refactor API routing" --max-budget-usd 5,
the engine now tracks the spend in real time.
The microsecond that five-dollar limit is breached, it forcefully kills every active
background subagent.
No exceptions.
Instant death.
No zombie processes, no delayed API calls draining your account.
That's exactly what we needed.
Oh, they also snuck in a few smaller things.
If you type :hea now, it triggers an emoji autocomplete in the terminal.
Very modern.
Please tell me there's a way to turn that off.
I don't need emojis in my git logs.
You can!
You just set emojiCompletionEnabled to false in your config.
But hey, they also made the footer pull request links clickable for raw SSH and tmux
users, and they added disk space warnings so your terminal transcripts don't
silently corrupt when your drive fills up.
Clickable SSH links are actually huge for my terminal workflow.
Alright, well, glad your wallet is safe now.
Yeah, thank goodness.
I'm going back to my bike before any more robots try to charge me.
Catch you later.