So I was updating Claude Code to version 2.1.233 the other morning,
mate, and I noticed my custom subagents suddenly started throwing errors.
Turns out Anthropic disabled built in task tracking tools like TaskCreate,
TaskGet, TaskUpdate, TaskList, and TodoWrite by default on all the newer models.
Wait, they straight up removed TaskCreate and TodoWrite on Sonnet 5 and Opus 4.8?
Yeah, on Sonnet 5, Opus 4.8, Fable 5, and Mythos 5, it is just turned off out of the
box now.
The idea is that these newer frontier models have enough raw reasoning capacity to
hold a multi step refactoring plan right in their working context without needing
structured tool calls.
Which makes sense for latency, right?
Like, stripping out those explicit todo tool calls means less prompt token bloat and
faster turn responses overall.
Spot on.
But if you have automated scripts or workflows expecting that specific TaskCreate
JSON output, it, it, it just breaks.
Exactly.
So how do we get those task tools back if our existing skill setups actually rely on
them?
It is pretty simple, actually.
You just export an environment variable, CLAUDE CODE ENABLE TODO TOOLS equals one.
You can toss that into your dot bashrc, dot zshrc, or right in your project dot env
file.
Okay, so if you set CLAUDE CODE ENABLE TODO TOOLS to one, it forces those tools back
on.
But I guess the trade off is higher per turn input token consumption?
Yeah, fair dinkum.
You are feeding those tool definitions back into the prompt every single exchange,
so it definitely inflates the context token count a bit.
So the play here is, leave it off for quick single file fixes or pure code
generation where you want cheap, snappy turns, but toggle it on when you are doing
massive, multi file codebase refactors that really benefit from an explicit task
checklist.
100 percent.
And look, version 2.1.233 snuck in a couple of other handy quality of life tweaks
too.
They added a forward user identity gateway setting, which is massive for teams doing
per user FinOps spend attribution.
Oh, nice!
So enterprise admins can track exactly who is burning through tokens on the API
gateway level.
Precisely.
Plus they patched a security vulnerability involving the Windows NT path device
prefix, backslash question mark question mark backslash, which stops NTLM credential
leak vectors in their tracks.
Man, blocking NTLM credential leaks on Windows is always a welcome fix.
So bottom line, if your subagents broke on update 2.1.233, just export CLAUDE CODE
ENABLE TODO TOOLS equals one and you are good to go.
Easy as that.
Catch you next time, mate.