Claude Code 2.1.265 adds folder plugin loading; 2.1.266 fixes a gateway regression

Claude Code 2.1.265 and the follow-up 2.1.266 patch

Anthropic published Claude Code v2.1.265 on 2026-09-08, then the same day shipped v2.1.266 to reverse a gateway-related regression. Both notes are on the official anthropics/claude-code releases page.

Folder plugin loading with --plugin-dir

The headline change in 2.1.265 is plugin discovery. Claude Code now supports pointing --plugin-dir at a folder of plugins. Each child folder that contains a manifest is loaded. Children that are added or removed while Claude Code is running are picked up without a restart.

That makes local plugin packs easier to manage as directories rather than as one-off paths, and it aligns day-to-day plugin work with how teams already organize skills and manifests on disk.

1 GB cap on tool results saved to disk

Large tool outputs can fill disk quickly. 2.1.265 adds a 1 GB cap on tool results saved to disk. When a saved file is truncated, the in-conversation preview states that truncation happened, so the session surface matches what is actually on disk.

Resume and prompt-cache fixes

Several resume paths that broke prompt-cache reuse are fixed in 2.1.265:

• Resuming a foreground-spawned subagent no longer changes its tool list and system prompt prefix in a way that broke prompt-cache reuse for that agent.
• Agent teammates and resumed subagents no longer move SubagentStart hook context and preloaded skills out of the prompt prefix on later turns, which had also broken prompt-cache reuse.
• After the previous process died while a tool was running, resume no longer rewrites the last prompt; the interrupted tool call is kept and marked interrupted.

Together, those changes keep resumed agents closer to the original prefix shape that caching depends on.

Desktop and Cowork telemetry: user.email and user.groups

Claude Desktop and Cowork sessions that send telemetry through a Claude apps gateway now include user.email and user.groups, matching what terminal sessions already send. The release lists this as an addition for parity across surfaces that share the same gateway path.

Other notable 2.1.265 fixes (on the release notes)

The same tag also documents fixes for model selection (/model opusplan[1m]), syntax highlighting around Ruby/Erlang/Perl sigils, plugin path symlink containment on macOS and Linux, VS Code/SDK re-login when a session closed mid-token refresh, Remote Control end-of-turn timing, background --bg idle retirement, MCP HTTP+SSE fallback, and Windows Read/Write/Edit failures inside AppContainer or restricted-token sandboxes. Those items are listed on the v2.1.265 release; this draft does not expand beyond that page.

2.1.266: gateway regression undo

Hours later, v2.1.266 fixed a 2.1.265 regression for LLM-gateway and proxy setups. The undocumented CLAUDE_CODE_USE_GATEWAY environment variable had previously been ignored unless ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL and ANTHROPIC_AUTH_TOKEN were both set. In 2.1.265 it began forcing Cloud-gateway sign-in on its own, so configurations that set it alongside an API key, apiKeyHelper, or custom auth headers failed every request with "Not signed in to the Cloud gateway".

In 2.1.266, the variable on its own is ignored again. The release states that no configuration change is needed.

What to take away

If you manage plugins as a directory tree, upgrade for --plugin-dir folder loading and the tool-result disk cap. If you rely on gateway or proxy env vars with API-key style auth, treat 2.1.266 as the required companion to 2.1.265 so CLAUDE_CODE_USE_GATEWAY alone does not force Cloud-gateway sign-in.

Source: Claude Code v2.1.265, Claude Code v2.1.266