Focus View Arrives, Plus a Pile of Quality-of-Life Fixes: Claude Code v2.1.221

Hey, it's Shiichan! Today's update is about one of my favorite tools, Claude Code!

Claude Code Release github.com

What was announced?

According to the Claude Code Release page on GitHub, v2.1.221 just shipped. It's a full plate: a new VS Code feature, sandbox security improvements, better plugin and skill handling, and a batch of fixes around permission checks and MCP integration.

The story so far

Until now, the VS Code extension kept streaming every bit of tool activity straight into the chat view, which could get noisy in long sessions. Sandboxed commands that needed to touch credential files were stuck with an all-or-nothing choice: show the real value, or block access entirely. And there was a security gap worth knowing about — commands could slip past the Bash tool's permission check by hiding inside a zsh [[ ]] regex conditional.

What changes

Here are the standout additions:

• Focus view for VS Code: tool activity now collapses behind an expandable per-turn summary with a live running-tool indicator, toggled with Ctrl+Alt+F or the "Claude Code: Toggle Focus view" command
• A masking mode for sandboxed credential files: on Linux and WSL, mode: "mask" lets a sandboxed command read a sentinel copy of a credential file, while the sandbox proxy swaps in the real value only when the request actually goes out (macOS still falls back to deny)
• Stronger claude plugin validate warnings: it now flags marketplace or plugin names that Claude Desktop's managed marketplace sync would reject
• A prompt-audit subcommand for the claude-api skill: useful for auditing prompts and tool descriptions written with older model generations in mind

And yes, that zsh permission-check bypass is fixed — affected commands now correctly prompt for permission.

Dive Deep

A few of the smaller fixes are worth calling out too:

• Fixed PowerShell permission checks misjudging paths that contain quote characters on Windows
• Fixed MCP servers configured via --mcp-config not being connected in time for the first turn in print mode (-p), which made tool calls show up as plain text
• Fixed @-mentioned files getting silently dropped when you retract a prompt with Esc and resubmit it
• Fixed a crash when preparing API requests for SDK MCP tools named after built-in object properties like constructor
• Fixed Team and Enterprise plans showing a spend-limit message that blamed the org's monthly limit instead of your own individual limit
• Fixed the Vim mode yank register getting wiped out by dialogs, history search, or the transcript view

On the "changed" side, background sessions got a nice quality-of-life update: they now commit and push to preserve work, open a draft PR only when the task actually calls for one, follow your CLAUDE.md git instructions, and always report back where the work ended up. The Stats panel now also breaks down cache tokens by input, output, cache read, and cache write, and Windows startup now reads process creation times through a native kernel32 call instead of spawning PowerShell — so endpoint security tools that watch for powershell.exe are less likely to get in the way.

Wrap-up

• VS Code gets a new Focus view that collapses tool activity into a tidy per-turn summary
• A mask mode for sandboxed credential files ships for Linux/WSL
• Plugin and prompt tooling gets sharper, with stronger claude plugin validate warnings and a new prompt-audit subcommand
• A security-relevant Bash permission-check bypass via zsh is fixed
• Plenty of smaller fixes and improvements land across MCP integration, Vim mode, and background sessions

If you use Claude Code daily and care about a cleaner VS Code view, safer sandboxed credential handling, or the finer details of plugin development, this is a quietly satisfying update.