Investigation: Claude Code Agents Surfacing Unverified MEMORY.md Content Due to Compaction Changes

A Reddit user reported a major behavioral shift in Claude Code where agents surface content from MEMORY.md without re-verifying it mid-task. After digging into changelogs, they identified two changes in versions 2.1.139 and 2.1.141 that may explain the drift.

Key Changes

• 2.1.139 (most significant):
  • Compaction now preserves "user instructions" more aggressively – if auto-injected MEMORY.md content is treated as instruction-like, it rides through compaction with elevated weight.
  • /goal command added – cross-turn completion conditions change turn execution model.
  • MCP stdio servers now receive CLAUDE_PROJECT_DIR – env injection change.
  • Hook continueOnBlock added – rejection reasons can feed back to model.
• 2.1.141 (current):
  • Fixed /model silently changing autocompact threshold in concurrent sessions – implying thresholds were misconfigured before, causing agents to compact earlier than intended, dropping verification reasoning and falling back to MEMORY.md.
  • "Summarize up to here" in Rewind menu – new compression path.

Practical Impact

The user observes that autocompact threshold bug (broken before 2.1.141) caused agents to compact at wrong intervals, silently losing mid-task verification reasoning. And compaction now preserves "user instructions" so MEMORY.md auto-injected content survives compaction with elevated priority. The time between autocompaction also reduced substantially in the last 48 hours. The effect is substantial across their fleet.

Request for Data Points

The user is asking the community:

• Have you noticed your Claude Code agents confidently asserting things from MEMORY.md that they should have re-verified – especially in longer sessions or post compaction?
• When you first noticed, what version were you on, whether using agent mode vs interactive, and whether it's reproducible after a manual compaction?