Picture this.
You set off an autonomous Claude Code subagent on a massive background job,
say, a ninety minute end to end test suite or a massive Docker build.
You grab a coffee, come back an hour later...
and boom.
It was abruptly killed right at the sixty minute mark.
Well, version 2.1.260 eliminates that invisible ceiling, brought to you by Jellypod
AI.
Man, that sixty minute cutoff was such a silent killer!
You would have long running database migrations or web scrapers running in a
subagent, and suddenly everything just dropped dead with zero warning.
Oh, tell me about it mate!
I, I, I actually had a multi repo test pipeline fail on me mid run last week because
of that exact limit.
I thought I was going bonkers!
But yeah, according to the official release notes for Claude Code version 2.1.260,
Anthropic removed the one hour time limit on background commands started by
subagents.
So now subagent background tasks just run indefinitely until they finish or until
you manually stop them, which finally matches how the main session behaves.
Spot on.
And the practical workflow now is super clean, mate.
You just dispatch your long background job through a subagent,
and then you can monitor the whole process directly using commands like attach,
logs, and stop.
You do not have to worry about some arbitrary timer pulling the plug while you step
away from the terminal.
Okay, but, uh...
wait.
If subagents do not auto terminate background processes at sixty minutes anymore,
what happens if a task gets stuck in an infinite loop?
Ah, now you are asking the real questions .
Seriously though!
On build host machines or cloud instances, a hung or spinning subagent task will now
literally run forever if you do not watch it.
That is a quick way to burn through your cloud budget or spike host CPU to one
hundred percent.
Yeah, fair point.
You definitely cannot just fire and forget without guardrails anymore.
Exactly.
You have to pair this uncapped execution with proper process monitoring,
or wrap your commands in explicit timeout scripts, or even use Linux cgroups memory
limits on your build runners so runaway processes get caught before they wreck your
server.
That is solid advice, mate.
You gotta respect the power of an infinite runtime.
Definitely.
Were there any other noteworthy changes packed into 2.1.260?
Yeah, a couple of really neat quality of life tweaks.
For one, they added a text form of the advisor command, so you can run slash
advisor, slash advisor followed by the model name, or slash advisor off.
That is massive for headless setups, Remote Control, and Agent SDK workflows where
you do not have an interactive UI picker.
Oh nice!
What about safety around git worktrees?
Did anything change there?
Glad you asked!
Before, if you went to delete a background session worktree with unpushed work,
it was pretty easy to accidentally wipe stuff out.
Now, Claude Code gives you a clear safety prompt that spells out the exact branch
name and the specific commit count before deleting anything.
So if you see three unpushed commits on feature branch main,
you get a chance to save your skin before double deleting!
That alone is gonna save a lot of developers from a heart attack.
Unlimited subagent runtimes plus safer worktree cleanup makes 2.1.260 a really solid
release.
No doubt about it, mate.
Go update your CLI and let those builds run!