Anthropic brings background async subagents and workflow polish to Claude Code
Anthropic rolled out a notable update to Claude Code, adding background asynchronous subagents and several workflow improvements that streamline longer development sessions. The release focuses on persistent monitoring, faster context management, and session organization features that align the tool more closely with conventional developer workflows.
Async subagents for long-running tasks
The headline addition is asynchronous subagents that continue running after the main agent becomes inactive. These subagents can be assigned long-lived responsibilities such as polling an issue, monitoring logs, or waiting for build results. They operate independently and can report back when conditions change, enabling parallelism between ongoing background work and foreground interactions.
In the provided demo, an agent polls an issue every 10 seconds and notifies when a new comment appears, while the main agent remains idle or attends to other tasks. This change moves Claude Code toward more autonomous, persistent behaviors useful for repetitive or time-sensitive monitoring.
Dramatically faster context compaction
Claude Code’s context compaction — the process that preserves relevant information while trimming conversation history — now runs “exponentially faster”, shrinking from longer pauses to just a few seconds. That improvement reduces interruptions during extended coding sessions and helps maintain responsiveness when history needs pruning.
Session renaming and keyboard shortcuts
Session management got more practical with the introduction of a /rename command, allowing custom names for existing sessions. Anthropic also added keyboard shortcuts on the /resume screen:
- R — rename a session
- P — preview a session
These small changes make navigating past work and switching between projects feel closer to a traditional IDE experience.
Visual usage dashboard with /stats
A new /stats command offers a visual activity summary showing daily activity, session history, streaks, and overall trends. This lightweight dashboard provides developers a quick way to review how often Claude Code is being used and how habits evolve over time.
Availability
All features in this update are available now. Installation is performed with the command claude update.
Original source: Anthropic announcement provided in the prompt.
