Restore Claude Code Todo Tools After the 2.1.233 Update

Lachlan Reed

So I was updating Claude Code to version 2.1.233 the other morning, mate, and I noticed my custom subagents suddenly started throwing errors. Turns out Anthropic disabled built in task tracking tools like TaskCreate, TaskGet, TaskUpdate, TaskList, and TodoWrite by default on all the newer models.

James Turner

Wait, they straight up removed TaskCreate and TodoWrite on Sonnet 5 and Opus 4.8?

Lachlan Reed

Yeah, on Sonnet 5, Opus 4.8, Fable 5, and Mythos 5, it is just turned off out of the box now. The idea is that these newer frontier models have enough raw reasoning capacity to hold a multi step refactoring plan right in their working context without needing structured tool calls.

James Turner

Which makes sense for latency, right? Like, stripping out those explicit todo tool calls means less prompt token bloat and faster turn responses overall.

Lachlan Reed

Spot on. But if you have automated scripts or workflows expecting that specific TaskCreate JSON output, it, it, it just breaks.

James Turner

Exactly. So how do we get those task tools back if our existing skill setups actually rely on them?

Lachlan Reed

It is pretty simple, actually. You just export an environment variable, CLAUDE CODE ENABLE TODO TOOLS equals one. You can toss that into your dot bashrc, dot zshrc, or right in your project dot env file.

James Turner

Okay, so if you set CLAUDE CODE ENABLE TODO TOOLS to one, it forces those tools back on. But I guess the trade off is higher per turn input token consumption?

Lachlan Reed

Yeah, fair dinkum. You are feeding those tool definitions back into the prompt every single exchange, so it definitely inflates the context token count a bit.

James Turner

So the play here is, leave it off for quick single file fixes or pure code generation where you want cheap, snappy turns, but toggle it on when you are doing massive, multi file codebase refactors that really benefit from an explicit task checklist.

Lachlan Reed

100 percent. And look, version 2.1.233 snuck in a couple of other handy quality of life tweaks too. They added a forward user identity gateway setting, which is massive for teams doing per user FinOps spend attribution.

James Turner

Oh, nice! So enterprise admins can track exactly who is burning through tokens on the API gateway level.

Lachlan Reed

Precisely. Plus they patched a security vulnerability involving the Windows NT path device prefix, backslash question mark question mark backslash, which stops NTLM credential leak vectors in their tracks.

James Turner

Man, blocking NTLM credential leaks on Windows is always a welcome fix. So bottom line, if your subagents broke on update 2.1.233, just export CLAUDE CODE ENABLE TODO TOOLS equals one and you are good to go.

Lachlan Reed

Easy as that. Catch you next time, mate.