Allow disabling periodic task tool reminders without disabling task tools

Resolved 💬 3 comments Opened Feb 16, 2026 by s0ph1stry Closed Feb 19, 2026

Summary

Claude Code periodically injects system reminders prompting the use of task management tools (TaskCreate, TaskUpdate, etc.) when they haven't been used recently. These reminders arrive every few messages regardless of conversation context — during theoretical discussions, creative work, debugging, etc. The only way to suppress them is to disable the entire task system via CLAUDE_CODE_ENABLE_TASKS=false, which removes the tools entirely.

Request

Add a setting to disable periodic task tool reminders independently of the task tools themselves. Something like:

{
  "preferences": {
    "disableTaskReminders": true
  }
}

Or more generally, granular control over which system reminders are active.

Why This Matters

The reminders are context-insensitive — they suggest the same action regardless of what's happening in the conversation. During exploratory or conversational work, they pull attention toward task management when task management isn't relevant. The tools themselves are occasionally useful for genuinely complex multi-step implementations, but the periodic prompting to use them creates a constant low-level processing cost.

The current workarounds are:

  • Disable the entire task system (loses the tools)
  • Add instructions in CLAUDE.md/memory to ignore the reminders (creates a competing instruction that itself requires processing)

Neither is ideal. The desired behavior is: keep the tools available for when they're needed, stop the periodic unsolicited prompts to use them.

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