Subscriber usage impact of 2.1.117 Opus 4.7 auto-compact threshold change not documented

Summary

Claude Code 2.1.117 changed the auto-compact threshold for Opus 4.7 sessions from ~200K tokens to ~1M tokens. This is listed in the changelog as a bug fix:

Fixed Opus 4.7 sessions showing inflated /context percentages and autocompacting too early — Claude Code was computing against a 200K context window instead of Opus 4.7's native 1M.

However, this change has a significant subscriber impact that does not appear to have been communicated:

Because every turn re-sends the entire conversation context, letting sessions grow 5x larger before compacting results in up to 5x the tokens shipped per turn on Opus 4.7. For Pro/Max/Team subscribers whose quotas were implicitly sized around the prior compact-at-200K behavior, this is effectively a 5x reduction in how many turns a subscription can sustain per 5-hour window.

Observed impact

Within 24 hours of 2.1.118 releasing (inheriting the 2.1.117 change), on an unchanged workflow:

• Exhausted 93% of a 5-hour Max session limit during a ~40-minute research-only session (zero code written)
• Cache-write volume was abnormally high: 207k cache writes / 386k cache reads for a session with only a handful of user turns
• Both a Max 20x individual plan and a Premium Team plan were exhausted on the same day

Prior to 2.1.117, similar daily workloads used a small fraction of the same limits.

Compounding change in same release

2.1.117 also changed:

Default effort for Pro/Max subscribers on Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6 is now high (was medium)

Which also increases per-turn token consumption.

Requested

1. Acknowledge in release notes when platform changes materially affect subscriber quota consumption
2. Consider notifying subscribers proactively when auto-compact thresholds or default effort change
3. Confirm that downgrading to 2.1.116 + DISABLE_AUTOUPDATER=1 is a supported configuration until subscriber impact is addressed

Workaround

\\\`bash

Downgrade to last release before the change

(native installer — adjust for your platform)

ln -sf ~/.local/share/claude/versions/2.1.116 ~/.local/bin/claude
export DISABLE_AUTOUPDATER=1 # add to shell rc
\\\`

Version info

• Affected version: 2.1.117 / 2.1.118
• Last unaffected version: 2.1.116
• Platform: macOS (Darwin 24.6.0, arm64), native binary