Claude Code v2.1.221 Ships Today: Focus View for Cleaner Sessions and Credential Masking on Linux

Claude Code v2.1.221 (August 4, 2026) lands a VSCode Focus view that collapses tool noise into one summary line, sandbox credential masking on Linux, and a new prompt-audit command.

VSCode Focus View

Toggle with Ctrl+Alt+F or "Claude Code: Toggle Focus view" in the command palette. When enabled, all tool activity — file reads, bash runs, search calls — collapses behind an expandable per-turn summary with a live running-tool indicator. Only Claude's reasoning and responses stay visible.

Use it for: long editing sessions where watching every file read is noise, or when pair-coding and you want to show a colleague the high-level flow without wall-to-wall tool output.

Sandbox Credential Masking (Linux/WSL)

Set mode: "mask" on sandbox credential files. Sandboxed commands read a sentinel copy; the sandbox proxy substitutes the real credential on egress. Previously Linux/WSL required workarounds (the feature existed on macOS with a deny fallback). Engineers running Claude Code in WSL or Linux containers now get the same credential-safe sandbox behavior as macOS users.

Prompt-audit subcommand

claude-api prompt-audit

The new prompt-audit subcommand in the claude-api skill scans system prompts and tool descriptions for patterns written for older model generations — explicit chain-of-thought instructions, temperature hacks, workarounds Claude 4.x and 5.x handle natively. Run this before your next model migration to surface stale prompt patterns.

Notable bug fixes

• @-mentioned files were dropped on resubmit — fixed
• WebSearch failed at effort: xhigh/max with thinking disabled — fixed
• Reduced prompt-cache costs for auto-mode permission checks
• Zsh [[ ]] regex conditionals and PowerShell quote-handling permission bypasses — fixed

Sources: Claude Code Changelog — code.claude.com · Claude Code Updates August 2026 — releasebot.io