Claude Code v2.1.198: Chrome GA, Agent Notifications, /dataviz

Anthropic released Claude Code v2.1.198 with several quality-of-life improvements, new skills, and a handful of stability fixes. Here's what's relevant for daily use.

Chrome Extension Now GA

The Claude in Chrome extension is now generally available — no longer in preview.

Background Agent Notifications

Claude agents sessions that need input or finish now fire the Notification hook with agent_needs_input and agent_completed event types. This lets downstream scripts react to agent lifecycle changes.

New /dataviz Skill

The /dataviz skill provides chart and dashboard design guidance and includes a runnable color-palette validator — useful for teams generating visualizations via Claude.

Gateway: AWS Upstream Provider

Claude Platform on AWS (anthropicAws) is now available as an upstream provider in the Gateway. When a model is not found, the response advances the failover chain automatically.

Subagent and Workflow Improvements

Background agents launched from claude agents now commit, push, and open a draft PR when they finish code work in a worktree — instead of stopping to ask for confirmation.
The built-in Explore agent now inherits the main session's model (capped at Opus) instead of always running on Haiku.
Subagents and context compaction now inherit the session's extended thinking configuration, improving output quality on delegated tasks.
Subagents now treat messages from the agent that launched them as normal task direction.
Agent teams: a teammate that dies on an API error now reports failed to the lead, and messaging a stuck teammate wakes it to retry immediately.

Notable Fixes

Network drop resilience: transient errors like ECONNRESET now retry with backoff instead of aborting the turn.
Background tasks in web, desktop, and VS Code task panels no longer get stuck on "Running" after completion or session resume.
AWS STS token refresh: sessions using Claude Platform on AWS or Mantle no longer dead-end with Please run /login — awsAuthRefresh runs automatically.
macOS background agents: fixed "no route to host" for local-network hosts by declaring Local Network entitlements.
Highlight.js upgraded to v11 for improved syntax highlighting in code blocks, diffs, and file previews.
/branch now derives its default fork name from the first real prompt instead of the compaction summary.