Claude Code Features — 2026 Q2
Speculative notes on the current feature surface and likely Q2 direction

• Opus 4.6 with 1M context. The default model for substantive work. The 1M context window changes the shape of agent tasks: entire repositories, long research threads, and multi-day sessions fit without summarization. Compaction still happens but is less frequent.
• /fast mode. Same Opus 4.6 model, faster output path. Tradeoff: slightly less deliberation for much lower latency. Useful for exploratory edits and interactive pair-programming.
• Haiku 4.5 (claude-haiku-4-5-20251001). The lightweight option when you know the task is mechanical.

Hooks are shell commands wired to lifecycle events in settings.json. They run in the harness, not the model, which means they are deterministic and auditable. Common uses:

• SessionStart to prime beads, gossip, or telemetry
• PreToolUse / PostToolUse to enforce policy (reject rm -rf, log writes, attach attribution)
• UserPromptSubmit to inject repo-specific context

The important property: hooks are the correct primitive for "from now on whenever X do Y" rules. Asking the model to remember a behavioral rule is fragile; a hook is not.

User-invocable skills (/commit, /review, /security-review, etc.) are prompt templates with tool scopes. They expand to full prompts at call time and are discoverable at startup. The pattern:

• Named, composable prompts that encode workflow conventions
• Tool-list restriction per skill
• Discoverable through / completion

Skills are the bridge between "I have a convention I follow" and "the agent follows it too."

MCP servers provide tools over a local or remote transport. In 2026 Q1 we see:

• Cloudflare Developer Platform MCP (D1, R2, KV, Hyperdrive, Workers)
• Hugging Face MCP (models, datasets, spaces, papers)
• Gmail / Calendar / Drive MCPs for personal workflow
• Atlassian, Slack, Linear for team workflow
• Local MCPs for filesystem, git, and project-specific tooling

The interesting shift: MCPs are becoming the standard way to hand an agent an API, replacing ad-hoc tool definitions in the harness.

The Agent tool with subagent_type lets a parent agent delegate to a specialized child. Observed patterns in practice:

• Explore / Plan for research-heavy tasks that would pollute the parent context
• Role-based agents (code-reviewer, security-expert, sre, debugger) for perspectives
• Isolation via worktree: the child operates on a git worktree and returns the branch name

Subagents are most valuable as context firewalls. Their findings compress into a single message in the parent conversation instead of hundreds of tool calls.

git worktree add inside the repo under worktrees/ (gitignored) lets multiple Claude sessions run in parallel without stepping on each other. Combined with isolation: worktree on subagents, this becomes the basic unit of speculative work.

The file-based memory system at ~/.claude/projects/{project}/memory/ persists across sessions. MEMORY.md is the loaded index; individual memory files are fetched lazily. Types:

• user — role, preferences, knowledge
• feedback — corrections and validated approaches
• project — initiatives, deadlines, why decisions were made
• reference — pointers to external systems

The harness loads MEMORY.md automatically. The model's job is to keep it curated.

Skills that reference skills. /release calling /test then /commit then /push as a deterministic pipeline, with model judgment gated at decision points only.

MCPs return more structured resources — not just tool results. Think application/json+schema resources that agents can introspect before calling tools.

Worktree isolation is a start. The next step is process or network-level isolation for untrusted operations (web fetch, package install, build). This is where Cloudflare Sandbox GA becomes interesting — a persistent sandbox primitive that a subagent can inhabit.

A2A (agent-to-agent) in Anthropic's framing, MCP-over-network, and Cloudflare's direction around agent-readiness (see Cloudflare Agent Readiness) all point at the same thing: standard ways for agents to discover and invoke each other. Expect Claude Code to consume these standards as first-class MCP transports.

Task tracking outside the conversation (beads, Linear, Jira) is strictly better than TodoWrite for multi-session work. Expect the harness to lean harder on external trackers as the source of truth.