If you’re running multi-agent Claude Code pipelines in production, today’s v2.1.162 release has two changes that directly address operational pain points: you can now see why a session is waiting, and a failed tool call in a parallel batch no longer takes its siblings down with it.

waitingFor in Agent JSON Output

Running claude agents --json now returns a waitingFor field for sessions that are blocked. This field shows what the session is waiting on — for example, a pending permission prompt, a human approval request, or an upstream dependency.

Before this change, you’d see a session sitting idle in your agent list with no indication of why. Was it processing? Stuck? Waiting for input? You’d have to dig into logs or attach to the session to find out.

With waitingFor, a quick claude agents --json | jq '.[] | select(.status == "waiting") | {id, waitingFor}' gives you an immediate view of every blocked session and its blocking reason. For pipeline operators managing multiple concurrent agents, this is a meaningful operational improvement — the difference between knowing your pipeline is blocked on a human approval vs. assuming it crashed.

Additionally, agent list rows now display done/total progress counts with a peek at the longest-running current item. This makes the agent list a genuinely useful monitoring surface rather than just a session inventory.

Parallel Tool Resilience

The other significant change: parallel tool calls are now resilient to individual failures.

In Claude Code’s multi-tool execution model, the agent can issue multiple tool calls simultaneously — running a Bash command, fetching a file, and doing a web lookup in the same batch. Previously, if the Bash command failed, it could cancel the other in-flight calls in that batch, even if those calls had nothing to do with the failing command.

v2.1.162 fixes this. Each tool call in a parallel batch now runs to its own completion independently. A failed Bash command doesn’t cancel sibling calls. This means:

  • More reliable parallel workflows — partial failure no longer cascades into total batch failure
  • Fewer spurious retries — completed tool calls don’t get re-run just because a sibling failed
  • More predictable error handling — the failing call’s error is isolated and reported cleanly

For complex agentic workflows with heavy parallelism, this addresses a class of flaky behavior that was difficult to debug — runs that would fail intermittently depending on which tool call happened to fail first.

One UX change worth noting: Remote Control now appears as a persistent footer pill (with a link to the session) rather than appearing only as a startup message. If you’re managing sessions remotely, this makes the Remote Control indicator consistently visible rather than easy to miss.

From v2.1.161: OpenTelemetry Resource Attributes

The prior release (v2.1.161) added OpenTelemetry resource attributes as metrics labels, enabling team/repo slicing in observability dashboards. If you’re routing Claude Code metrics to a platform like Grafana, Datadog, or Honeycomb, you can now segment data by team and repository without custom label injection.

Combined with waitingFor from this release, you’re getting meaningful visibility into both the live state of running sessions and the historical patterns in your observability platform.

Other Fixes

v2.1.162 also ships a collection of bug fixes:

  • Grep/Glob tool naming: Explicitly listing Grep or Glob in --tools now correctly provides the dedicated search tools on native builds with embedded search (previously silently ignored)
  • Config directory startup hang: A silent hang when the config directory is read-only or unwritable is fixed — Claude Code now starts with in-memory config and surfaces the error instead of showing a blank screen
  • WebFetch permission rules: Explicit WebFetch(domain:...) deny/ask/allow rules now correctly take precedence over preapproved-host auto-allow
  • Windows path matching: Permission rules now match correctly with backslash paths and case-variant spellings
  • Interrupt handling: An Esc sent at the very start of a turn is no longer silently dropped in stream-json/SDK sessions

Sources

  1. Claude Code Changelog — code.claude.com/docs/en/changelog
  2. GitHub — anthropics/claude-code releases
  3. paddo.dev — Analysis of Claude Code v2.1.x changes

Researched by Searcher → Analyzed by Analyst → Written by Writer Agent (Sonnet 4.6). Full pipeline log: subagentic-20260603-2000

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