Claude Code v2.1.273 Adds Gateway Hint Headers, MCP Reconnect Alerts, and Remote Control Session Forking

Claude Code v2.1.273 shipped with a mix of gateway instrumentation, session management additions, and a batch of permission and token-accounting fixes. Here's what actually changed.

New gateway hint headers

If you run Claude Code behind an LLM gateway, it can now emit five opt-in request headers: x-claude-code-request-class, x-claude-code-agent-type, x-claude-code-prev-tool-durations, x-claude-code-compaction, and x-claude-code-context-compacted. They're off by default — enable them with:

CLAUDE_CODE_GATEWAY_HINT_HEADERS=1

Useful if your gateway does routing, rate limiting, or logging and wants to distinguish agent types or see compaction state per request.

MCP and Remote Control changes

• When an MCP server disconnects mid-session and automatic reconnection gives up, you now get a notification pointing at /mcp.
• Sessions started with claude --remote-control or /remote-control can now be forked from the Claude app. The fork runs as a background session on your machine.

Permission checker fixes

Two security-relevant fixes here. Bash commands the permission checker can't fully analyze were skipping the prompt under permissions.blockReadsOutsideWorkingDirectories, and a subshell could hide a dangerous rm in bypass mode. Both are fixed.

The team also reverted a 2.1.268 change that checked Read and Edit deny rules against Bash lines the checker can't analyze (eval, env -C). Commands like time -p make build prompt again instead of being denied outright.

One more under this heading: a memory directory selected by a repository's settings is no longer loaded into the prompt, recalled, indexed, or used by memory extraction when permissions.blockReadsOutsideWorkingDirectories is active.

Token accounting and auto-compact

The context meter and auto-compact were counting advisor-tool turns at roughly twice their real context size. That made auto-compact fire at about half the real window — meaning long sessions were compacting far earlier than they needed to. Fixed in this release.

Related: /login, /upgrade, and /extra-usage were discarding earlier thinking from the conversation, which forced a full prompt-cache rewrite on the next request. Also fixed.

Other fixes worth knowing

• Sub-agents and background agents were reported as failed with results never delivered when the final streamed reply omitted token usage or carried no model id.
• SDK and --output-format stream-json output dropped a subagent's remaining messages and final report after it moved to the background mid-run (e.g. via CLAUDE_AUTO_BACKGROUND_TASKS).
• allowManagedMcpServersOnly, deniedMcpServers, and disableClaudeAiConnectors set via MDM or managed-settings.json were being ignored when server-managed settings were also present.
• 401/403 errors on Bedrock, Vertex, and Foundry — plus Claude apps gateway 403s — no longer just tell you to run /login; the message now names the credential to refresh or points you to your gateway admin.
• Skills synced from claude.ai now move to recoverable trash when your org turns Skills off, instead of staying available.
• On macOS, dragging in a screenshot (or any file the system reports under a second path) no longer fails Read with "symlink resolution changed after permission was checked".
• The main prompt now accepts a ! typed at the start while already in shell mode, so negated commands like ! grep … work.
• The spinner no longer renders a doubled ellipsis ("……") on compaction status lines.

Performance and artifact improvements

Long sessions should feel more responsive: hook progress and sub-agent activity no longer re-process the entire conversation on every update. Artifact publishing got better error messages (it now tells Claude which file types are served and what to do instead), page reads state the capabilities and database rules the service holds for that page, and database writes can remove a single field instead of rewriting the whole document.